EU Small and Medium-Sized Businesses See More Than 8x Growth in Codex and ChatGPT Work Users, With Gaps of Over 4x
OpenAI has released a report analyzing AI use among EU businesses. User numbers at small and medium-sized firms have risen sharply, but national usage shares and company-level usage intensity still vary widely.
On October 14 local time, OpenAI introduced an economic research report analyzing how businesses in the European Union use AI. The analysis looks at how much companies rely on AI that handles tasks on its own (agentic AI), and what kinds of work people are doing with ChatGPT. According to the report, the number of users at EU small and medium-sized businesses who use Codex and ChatGPT Work at least once a week has grown more than 8x since May 2026.
How much did the number of users at small and medium-sized businesses grow?
In this analysis, a small or medium-sized business is defined as a company with 200 or fewer users attached to its account. Among companies meeting that threshold, the number of weekly users of the two products increased in every EU member state. The more than 8x figure is the combined result across all EU small and medium-sized businesses.
OpenAI used Codex and ChatGPT Work usage as an indicator of agentic AI use. Among the EU ChatGPT Enterprise customers in the sample, the two products accounted for more than half of the output generated. In other words, alongside the growth in user numbers, the report also shows the share of actual output the two products are responsible for.
How wide are the gaps between countries?
The share of usage taken by the two products varied sharply from country to country. Of the output volume on the ChatGPT Enterprise accounts in the sample, Codex and ChatGPT Work accounted for 22% in Slovenia and 85% in Lithuania. That is a 63 percentage point spread within the EU itself.
The report also analyzed how intensively companies use the tools. OpenAI classified companies in the top 10% by output generated per active user as “frontier firms.” As of September, usage per active user at EU frontier firms was more than 4x that of a typical EU company.
Frontier firms outside the EU used more than 2x as much as EU frontier firms. Of all frontier firms worldwide, 10% were based in the EU. The sample for these company-to-company comparisons consists of ChatGPT Enterprise and Business accounts.
What matters for people using AI at work
The analysis gives a basis for separating two questions: whether a company has adopted AI, and how heavily it actually uses it. Weekly user counts show how many people are using a product, while output per active user shows how much any one person is using it. OpenAI’s “frontier firm” label is a classification based on the latter measure.
What is worth watching next is which tasks the increased usage is concentrated in, and whether it translates into real time savings or better business results. Even as the number of users of the two products grows quickly at EU small and medium-sized businesses, the gap in intensity of use between companies remains.