OpenAI reported that Codex, its AI model, has become the primary tool for work across the company, with non-technical departments like Legal and Recruiting now relying on it. The shift marks a significant change in how agentic AI is used for long-horizon tasks. Codex's adoption has grown alongside its capabilities, enabling users to handle complex, time-intensive work that would take humans more than an hour to complete.
By May 2026, 80.6% of individual Codex users made requests estimated to exceed 30 minutes of human work, with 70.2% handling tasks taking over an hour. The model's ability to operate independently for minutes or hours while orchestrating tool calls and iterating toward solutions has made it the most powerful AI tool for work. OpenAI workers now use Codex for over 85% of their output tokens, with non-developer users growing 137x for individual users and 189x for organizational users.
The transformation at OpenAI highlights how agentic tools are reshaping productivity. Engineers were the first to adopt Codex, but by April 2026, Legal, Finance, and Recruiting departments had also transitioned to using it as their primary AI tool. The company noted that Codex has enabled workers to take on tasks outside their job descriptions, including coding and technical execution, even for non-technical users.
Source: openai
