OpenAI is getting serious about courting enterprise users. On Tuesday, the AI lab released a new set of capabilities for Codex, meant to expand the agentic tool's uses in the workplace beyond software engineering.
Together with the new tools, the company released an internal report titled "The Next Era of Knowledge Work," finding that Codex's uses go far beyond coding. "Codex now has more than 5 million weekly active users, up more than 6x since the launch of the desktop app in February," reads a blog post introducing the report. "While developers remain the largest user group, knowledge workers now represent about 20 percent of users and are growing more than three times as fast".
Six Job-Specific Plugins Launched
To further court those users, OpenAI released a set of six plug-ins aimed at specific jobs: data analytics, creative production, sales, product design, equity investing, and investment banking. Available from within the Codex app, each of the new tools bundles integrations, instructions, and context to allow Codex to approximate a specific job.
Like any AI tool, the plug-ins will grow more effective with user customization, but they're meant to be effective tools out of the box. The equity investing and investment banking plugins draw live data from eight named providers FactSet, S&P Global, PitchBook, LSEG, Moody's, Daloopa, Datasite, and Hebbia targeting terminal and dashboard workflows directly.
According to Axios, which received task-level usage data exclusively before public release, data analytics usage jumped 110% week over week and research tasks rose 37% among knowledge workers.
The Data Behind the Shift
OpenAI's internal data suggests a broader shift is underway. "Knowledge workers primarily use Codex to create reports, spreadsheets, presentations, contracts, and other work products," the company reported. "They are also increasingly using it for research, data analysis, workflow automation, and building lightweight tools that previously required engineering support".
The fastest-growing knowledge-worker tasks are data analysis, research, and knowledge artifact creation. At the same time, users are increasingly running multiple Codex tasks in parallel, allowing them to investigate data, draft materials, and automate workflows simultaneously.
"This kind of increased velocity could reshape AI's long-term impact on work: Codex can help people take on more ambitious projects, leading to greater scope of their roles, and potentially accelerate career advancement," OpenAI stated.
New Sites and Annotations Features
Together with the plug-ins, OpenAI introduced a new Sites feature, which allows Codex to output its work product as a hosted interactive website, instead of just a local file. As part of that system, OpenAI is partnering with Wix, Base44, Replit, Lovable, Figma, and Emergent although the company plans to develop a larger partner ecosystem to support the service.
A new Annotations feature will also allow users to designate a specific part of a document or file within Codex, allowing for more specific commands and context operations.
Enterprise Push Accelerates
The new tools come after a similar push for agentic plug-ins from Anthropic, which launched its enterprise agents program in February. With its traditional consumer focus, OpenAI has been slower to court enterprise customers, only introducing plug-in support for Codex in March.
The new enterprise features come just three weeks after OpenAI launched a new joint venture for enterprise clients, dubbed the OpenAI Deployment Company. The venture includes more than $4 billion in funding from global investment firms, with the aim of integrating OpenAI tools more deeply into businesses around the world.
"AI is becoming capable of doing increasingly meaningful work inside organizations," OpenAI chief revenue officer Denise Dresser said in a statement at launch. "The challenge now is helping companies integrate these systems into the infrastructure and workflows that power their businesses".
Codex Becomes a Productivity Tool for Everyone
Across industries, the pattern is similar: people are using Codex to reduce the friction of modern work, according to OpenAI's report. It helps them find information buried across systems, coordinate work across tools and teams, produce high-quality deliverables, and move projects through review and approval processes.
Codex is also being merged into the ChatGPT app itself, removing the product separation between OpenAI's consumer assistant and its enterprise agent offering. This collapses the product boundary between OpenAI's consumer assistant and its enterprise agent platform, giving the $4 billion Deployment Company JV a unified distribution layer to sell.
More than 5 million people now use Codex every week, with non-developers including analysts, marketers, operators, designers, researchers, investors, and bankers now making up about 20% of overall Codex users and growing more than 3x as fast as developers.
Essentially, OpenAI, along with partners like Wix, Figma, and Replit, are building Codex into an enterprise professional layer that extends beyond traditional coding into the broader realm of knowledge work.
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