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A new wave of haves and have nots among global companies is emerging based on AI use.
The gap is widening between enterprises that have aggressively adopted AI and those that are taking it on more slowly, new data from OpenAI shows.
Firms that ranked in the top 10% of AI usage in June consumed 8.3 times as many output tokens per user compared with companies in the middle of the pack. In January, the top firms utilized 2.6 times the median, according to the OpenAI report, shared first with Semafor.
The study also showed that collectively, OpenAI’s business customers are now using more tokens on Codex, the company’s agentic coding platform, rather than on the traditional ChatGPT interface — suggesting businesses are shifting to embrace AI for “work that’s more doing rather than asking,” Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist, told Semafor.
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OpenAI is making a deeper push to woo corporate customers, in part to catch up with rival Anthropic, which put an early focus on businesses and coding tools in addition to the consumer market. Both companies are preparing for blockbuster IPOs.
The gap between AI leaders and laggards tracks past technological upheavals, like the advent of the internet, in which early adopters surged ahead, and the rest caught up once the productivity gains were proven, Chatterji said. The central challenge facing CEOs and CTOs today is to show their boards and shareholders that their rising spend on AI is worth it.
But high token usage doesn’t necessarily equate to productivity, and accurately measuring ROI remains “frankly difficult to do,” Chatterji said.