The AI Frontier: What OpenAI’s New Report Says About Usage (And What That Means For Top AI Adopters)

Perhaps lost in the year-end reviews and holiday hustle and bustle was the insightful AI synopsis from the company that kick-started it all. 

And the big headlines from OpenAI’s The State of Enterprise AI report?

• ChatGPT Enterprise seats have increased 9x YoY
• Approximately 20% of messages came “via a Custom GPT or Project”
• Token consumption per organization increased by 320x from the previous year 

While the report put the biggest spotlight on organizational insights, the takeaways from solving “enterprise problems,” as the report puts it, can “help fund broad, free access to powerful AI for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.”

“Enterprise problems … present the hardest technical challenges for frontier intelligence, requiring reliability, safety, and security at scale,” the report says. “The history of general purpose technologies … shows that significant economic value is created after firms translate underlying capabilities into scaled use cases. Enterprise AI now appears to be entering this phase.”

The research found that the average Enterprise worker sent 30% more ChatGPT messages since November 2024, saving an average of 40 to 60 minutes per day (with the largest time-savings per message had by accounting and finance users). As the gap widens between what the report defines as “frontier workers” in the 95th percentile of adoption and those in the median, frontier workers were generating 6 times as many messages, with the widest gaps for coding (17x), writing (11x), and analysis (10x).

(Source: OpenAI)

“These differences matter,” the report says. “Usage data matched to survey results show that users who engage across roughly seven task types report five times more time saved than those who use only about four. In other words, the benefits users realize from AI scale directly with depth of use.”

In so many ways, the path ahead feels like a wild frontier. For publishers looking ahead, the ways AI can create efficiencies goes beyond merely the text-generating function that so many credit/blame OpenAI for kick-starting. 

The best minds should be kept, like the frontier ahead, wide open.