OpenAI: agentic AI use surges 8x across EU businesses

Businesses across Europe are quietly moving past the chat era of AI.

OpenAI Economic Research just dropped a new report on enterprise AI adoption across the EU. The headline takeaway is clear: companies are transitioning from using AI for basic Q&A to deploying agentic tools that plan and execute entire workflows.

Agents take over enterprise tokens

According to OpenAI, agentic use is already dominating enterprise workloads. Among ChatGPT Enterprise customers in the EU sample, tools like Codex and ChatGPT Work now generate more than half of all output tokens.

Small and medium businesses are driving the most aggressive expansion. Since May 2026, weekly active users of Codex and ChatGPT Work among EU SMBs surged 8.1x, with growth recorded across every single EU member state.

A fragmented continent trailing global peers

Despite the explosive growth, the adoption map across the EU is wildly uneven. In enterprise accounts, agentic token shares ranged from just 22% in Slovenia to a staggering 85% in Lithuania. The specific workflows handed off to ChatGPT also varied significantly by country.

The bigger hurdle is the global gap. EU frontier firms generated over four times more output tokens per user in September than average EU firms. Yet non-EU frontier peers generated more than twice the output tokens per user compared to Europe's top tier.

Most glaring of all, EU firms accounted for just 10% of top frontier companies worldwide, punching well below Europe's share of global registered businesses.

Why it matters

For business leaders and operators, this marks a fundamental shift in how AI ROI is measured. The competitive edge is no longer about testing basic prompts; it is about delegating end-to-end execution to autonomous agents. Teams that fail to shift from conversational AI to agentic automation risk being outpaced by multiples in sheer output.

From a policy and industry perspective, OpenAI's report delivers both praise and a stark warning. The 8x SMB surge shows undeniable appetite on the ground, with countries like Lithuania demonstrating incredible agility. However, capturing only 10% of the world's frontier AI user base highlights the very real risk of Europe falling behind in global productivity.

We think publishing these numbers is a shrewd move by OpenAI. By spotlighting Europe's trailing position against global frontier firms, OpenAI makes a data-backed case to European regulators and enterprises: restrictive guardrails and slow deployment will cost European businesses their global competitiveness.