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ZDNET Highlights
- A study by OpenAI aims to assess the business impacts of AI.
- Productivity gains were found to vary between specific roles.
- Such early studies should be taken with some caution.
According to a new report from OpenAI, the use of AI is saving workers an average of 40 minutes to an hour of work per day.
reportPublished on Monday and titled “The State of Enterprise AI”, it focused on the use of ChatGPIT Enterprise across a variety of industries, and highlighted the roles and functions that could benefit most from the technology.
It comes just a week after ChatGPIT’s third birthday, and at a time of increasing competition among tech companies to capture the market for business customers, which OpenAI described in the report as key to unlocking the true economic value of AI.
“Over the past three years, the impact of AI has been most pronounced among consumers,” Ronny Chatterjee, the company’s chief economist, wrote in the report. “However, the history of general purpose technologies – from steam engines to semiconductors – shows that significant economic value is created once companies translate underlying capabilities into scaled use cases. Enterprise AI is now entering this phase, as many of the world’s largest and most complex organizations are beginning to use AI as core infrastructure.”
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(Disclosure: ZDNET’s parent company Ziff Davis filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.)
OpenAI, which kicked off the AI race with the release of ChatGPT, is also facing increasing pressure to stay ahead. Anthropic’s valuation has skyrocketed largely due to its popularity among enterprise customers and recent progress in Google’s own AI efforts. Allegedly OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had to announce an internal “Code Red”.
saving time at work
For the new study, OpenAI analyzed anonymized user data and surveyed 9,000 workers at 100 organizations. According to the company, ChatGPT Enterprise now serves more than seven million individual employees and has grown more than ninefold in year-over-year membership.
Three-quarters of survey respondents said the use of AI has increased the speed or quality of their work. In addition to the 40-60 minutes of time saved reported by the average respondent, data science, software engineering and communications workers said their efficiency increases were even greater – between an hour and 80 minutes on average.
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According to the report, the tasks that can be completed faster through the use of AI vary between roles. For example, 85% of marketers reported faster campaign execution, while 73% of engineers said the technology was enabling faster code delivery.
“These results indicate that productivity gains are already working across core enterprise functions, not just in entry-level technical roles,” Chatterjee wrote, echoing an MIT report published last week.
Yes, but…
Studying the use of AI in the workplace and translating it into tangible economic value remains a young and inexact science. So early reports like this from OpenAI should be taken seriously.
All AI developers have a clear incentive to present their technology and its economic impacts in an attractive light. But there are several factors relevant to the broader conversation about AI use in the workplace that were not directly included in OpenAI’s study, and that also deserve closer study.
Also: Fear of AI job cuts? 5 Ways to Future-Procure Your Career – Before It’s Too Late
For one, it’s not clear whether the faster outputs enabled by AI are always translating into higher quality, or whether it’s just causing a rising tide of so-called workarounds. Another study published earlier this year by freelancer platform Upwork also found a link between the use of AI at work and burnout, suggesting that the technology can have negative psychological effects on workers, even as it increases their productivity. And technology, as some industry leaders have readily acknowledged, could displace large numbers of human workers, resulting in wide-ranging social, political, and economic consequences.
For now, however, as they look to secure a larger share of the enterprise customer pie, leading AI developers will likely continue to focus on the technology’s ability to boost productivity and draw a direct line between that and broader economic prosperity.
For example, a recent study from Anthropic analyzed 100,000 conversations with the cloud and concluded that chatbots were helping users complete tasks 80% faster, which according to the company meant that the use of existing AI models could double the growth rate of the US economy over the next decade.
