A new OpenAI report reveals that while AI adoption in businesses is surging, most workers are saving only 40 to 60 minutes per day. The findings come from data on over a million customers and a survey of 9,000 employees. Despite benefits in task speed and new capabilities, productivity gains remain modest for the average user.
OpenAI's 2025 report, 'The State of Enterprise AI,' examines AI's role in workplaces using anonymized data from more than 1 million business customers and insights from a survey of 9,000 workers across nearly 100 organizations.
The data highlights rapid growth in AI usage. Weekly messages in ChatGPT Enterprise have risen nearly eightfold over the past year, while structured workflows like custom GPTs have increased 19 times. Companies are also submitting more complex prompts, with reasoning-token usage surging over 320-fold.
Yet, the practical impact varies. Seventy-five percent of workers say AI has boosted the speed or quality of their output, and the same proportion report tackling new tasks they couldn't handle before. On average, however, ChatGPT Enterprise users save just 40 to 60 minutes per active workday—far from the transformative efficiency some expected.
Specific tasks benefit most, including IT troubleshooting, campaign creation, and coding enhancements, where workers complete work more quickly. A clear divide emerges between average users and 'frontier' ones in the 95th percentile of adoption. These heavy users send about six times more messages and save over 10 hours weekly, roughly two hours daily, by integrating AI into routines and automating tasks.
OpenAI views this as a current snapshot, suggesting larger gains may arise as organizations adapt processes around the technology. For now, AI acts more as a helpful tool than a game-changer, easing tedium without reshaping daily workflows entirely.
