AI Saves Employees Much less Than an Hour Every Day, New OpenAI Report Exhibits
OpenAI’s 2025 ‘The State of Enterprise AI’ report supplies an in-depth take a look at how companies are utilizing AI instruments inside actual firms. Drawing on anonymized utilization knowledge from greater than 1 million enterprise clients, together with a survey of 9,000 employees at practically 100 organizations, the report presents an image of elevated AI adoption and integration within the office.
“Throughout surveyed enterprises, 75% of employees report that utilizing AI at work has improved both the velocity or high quality of their output,” the report states. Additionally, the report says that “75% of customers report with the ability to full new duties they beforehand couldn’t carry out.”
Nevertheless, the productiveness features may not be as common and widespread as anticipated: on common, ChatGPT Enterprise customers save lower than an hour of time per day, in accordance with the report.
Beneath is a breakdown of the report’s main findings.
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Report reveals productiveness features, nevertheless it’s not common
Regardless of the hype surrounding AI at work, the most recent knowledge from OpenAI means that the fact for many staff is modest. In its report, the corporate says that on common, ChatGPT Enterprise customers save solely about 40 to 60 minutes per lively workday.
That is not nothing, nevertheless it’s nowhere close to the sweeping productiveness overhaul that many hoped for. In a workday crammed with conferences, emails and gear overload, an hour reclaimed can really feel like a minimal profit quite than a tidal shift in productiveness.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s father or mother firm, in April filed a lawsuit towards OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in coaching and working its AI techniques.)
Just a few key findings
The report finds AI adoption inside firms is rising quick. Weekly messages in ChatGPT Enterprise have elevated practically eightfold prior to now 12 months, and the usage of structured workflows, comparable to customized GPTs, has risen 19 occasions. Corporations are pushing extra complicated prompts, too, with reasoning-token utilization rising greater than 320-fold.
However the outcomes do not scale on the identical fee. Employees say they full sure duties extra shortly — like IT troubleshooting, marketing campaign creation and coding enhancements — but the day-to-day features nonetheless add as much as roughly an hour on common.
A divide between heavy AI customers and everybody else
OpenAI’s knowledge reveals a widening hole between “frontier” customers — outlined by OpenAI as these within the ninety fifth percentile of adoption depth — and the common employee, nevertheless.
Frontier staff ship about six occasions extra messages than common customers. Unsurprisingly, these heavy customers report greater features of over 10 hours per week. They construct workflows round AI, automate routine duties and switch the instrument right into a reliable co-worker as an alternative of an occasional assistant. Although arguably, round 2 hours per day of saved time continues to be comparatively reasonable.
OpenAI frames the report as a snapshot of the place enterprise AI stands right now, quite than a ultimate verdict. The corporate means that future features may come not from the mannequin itself, however from how organizations reshape processes and workflows round it.
However for many employees, AI continues to be a sidekick. Helpful, however not transformative. It helps velocity issues up. It could even make some work much less tedious. However the typical employee saving beneath an hour a day factors to a expertise that’s highly effective, but nonetheless restricted. The massive query now’s whether or not these numbers will hold climbing, or whether or not an hour a day is nearer to the ceiling than AI fanatics need to admit.
