OpenAI announced Monday that enterprise usage of its artificial intelligence tools has seen substantial growth over the past year. The company reported an eight-fold increase in ChatGPT message volume since November 2024 and noted that workers utilizing the tools are saving up to an hour daily. This data emerges a week after CEO Sam Altman reportedly circulated an internal "code red" memo addressing competitive threats from Google.
The findings underscore OpenAI's strategic emphasis on strengthening its position in the enterprise AI market, even as it navigates increasing competitive pressures. According to the Ramp AI Index, approximately 36% of U.S. businesses are ChatGPT Enterprise customers, compared to 14.3% for rival Anthropic. Despite this lead, a majority of OpenAI's revenue continues to originate from consumer subscriptions, a segment facing challenges from Google's Gemini. The company also competes with Anthropic, whose revenue is predominantly derived from B2B sales, and a growing number of open-weight model providers targeting enterprise clients.
OpenAI's commitments of $1.4 trillion towards infrastructure over the coming years make robust enterprise growth critical to its financial model. Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI's chief economist, stated during a briefing that while consumers are important for economic growth, "when you look at historically transformative technologies like the steam engine, it's when firms adopt and scale these technologies that you really see the biggest economic benefits."
The company's new data indicates that adoption among larger enterprises is not only expanding but also becoming more deeply integrated into operational workflows. Organizations leveraging OpenAI's API are consuming 320 times more "reasoning tokens" than they did a year ago, suggesting a shift towards more complex problem-solving applications. Additionally, the use of custom GPTs, designed for codifying institutional knowledge and automating workflows, jumped 19-fold this year, now constituting 20% of enterprise messages. Digital bank BBVA, for example, reportedly employs over 4,000 custom GPTs. Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's chief operating officer, commented during the briefing that this demonstrates how "people are really able to take this powerful technology and start to customize it to the things that are useful to them."
The report also highlighted that three-quarters of surveyed enterprise workers indicate AI enables them to perform tasks, including technical ones, previously outside their capabilities. OpenAI observed a 36% increase in coding-related messages from teams outside of traditional engineering, IT, and research departments. However, the report also identified a "growing divide in AI adoption," with some "frontier" workers using more tools to achieve greater time savings compared to "laggard" counterparts. Lightcap noted that while some firms view AI as standalone software, others are embracing it as a fundamental "re-platforming of a lot of the company's operations."
