How frontier firms are pulling ahead

How frontier firms are pulling ahead B2B Signals shows how the frontier advantage is beginning to compound for firms using AI more deeply, more broadly, and in more delegated workflows. TLDR - Frontier firms—those at the 95th percentile of usage—now use 3.5x as much intelligence per worker as typical firms, up from 2x a year ago. - The gap is about depth, not just activity: Message volume explains only 36% of the frontier advantage; most of the gap comes from richer, more complex AI use. - Agentic workflows are becoming a frontier marker: The largest advantage shows up in advanced tools, with frontier firms sending 16x as many Codex messages per worker as typical firms. - Organizations can move toward the frontier: Leading firms measure depth, build governance for production use, invest in enablement, scale what works, and move from chat-based assistance to delegated work with agents. For many enterprises, the first phase of AI adoption was about access: who had AI tools, how many seats had been deployed, and whether employees were experimenting. That still matters. But access is no longer the differentiator. Our latest research suggests the frontier advantage is beginning to compound. Frontier firms are pulling ahead because they use more intelligence per worker, adopt advanced tools more intensively, and embed AI more deeply into workflows. Today, we’re introducing B2B Signals, a business extension of OpenAI Signals. It provides a recurring measure of how AI is diffusing across businesses, based on privacy-preserving, aggregated signals from enterprise use of OpenAI products, including: - How deeply AI is being used inside firms - Which tools and tasks are most associated with frontier adoption - Where business use cases are broadening across industries, products, and functions Note: All analyses in this report are based on de-identified, aggregated enterprise usage data. Message content was classified using automated systems, and no OpenAI employee reviewed individual enterprise, business, or API customer data as part of this analysis. The clearest signal is depth. Frontier firms now use 3.5x as much intelligence per worker as typical firms, up from 2x in April 2025. Message volume explains only 36% of that gap; the majority comes from deeper usage. Workers at the frontier are asking AI to take on more complex work, providing richer context, and generating more substantive outputs. In this report, we use tokens generated as a proxy for intelligence demanded. Tokens are not a direct measure of business value, but they help measure how much work employees are asking AI to do, making them a useful proxy for the depth of AI use. Put simply: Typical firms are using AI to answer questions; frontier firms are using it to help execute complex work. They are not just sending more messages; each interaction is doing more of the actual work. Together, these signals suggest frontier firms are using AI for more complex and challenging work. For leaders, the question is shifting from how many people have access or how often they use AI to where…