OpenAI’s latest economic research describes a move from brief chatbot interactions toward delegated, multi-step work. In the company’s May 2026 sample, more than 70% of individual Codex users assigned at least one task estimated to exceed an hour of human work.
The fastest user growth came from non-developers. OpenAI reports that legal, finance, recruiting, and other departments increasingly use agents for automation, data work, and technical execution.
These figures come from one provider’s ecosystem and should not be treated as a measure of the whole economy. They are still a useful signal: the unit of AI adoption is becoming the completed task, not the generated answer.