Widely viewed as a consumer-first company, OpenAI has released new data that indicates the ChatGPT maker’s enterprise offerings are gaining steady traction in an increasingly crowded market with tech giants like Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, and others.In the past year, the volume of weekly messages in ChatGPT Enterprise increased by eight per cent year-over-year (YoY), with the average worker sending 30 per cent more messages, OpenAI said in its first-ever ‘State of Enterprise AI’ report published on Monday, December 8.The report, which looks to provide insights on how enterprises are adopting AI tools, and how enterprise leaders are scaling pilots into real-world use cases, found that workers using AI tools reported daily productivity gains of 40-60 minutes.OpenAI also shared key data points indicating broader coding activity beyond tech roles, growing dependence on custom workflows, faster uptake in certain sectors like tech and healthcare, and a widening performance gap favouring top adopters of AI.The report comes at a time when other studies suggest that AI usage at large companies has rarely been making it past the pilot stage. In April this year, KPMG’s quarterly survey of 130 American business leaders at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue, found that the share of companies introducing AI beyond a pilot programme has remained stagnant, even though more businesses than ever are experimenting with the technology.Another study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that 95 per cent of 300 US-based firms that had invested somewhere between $35 billion and $40 billion in generative AI, saw little to no returns, largely due to flawed enterprise integration of AI.However, OpenAI has said that its assessment shows that enterprise AI adoption is not only broadening but deepening. “People aren’t just using AI more often. They are using it for increasingly sophisticated tasks. Enterprises are expanding both the extensive margin—more workers adopting AI—and the intensive margin—existing users going deeper,” the Microsoft-backed AI startup said.Story continues below this adIt also highlighted organisational readiness and implementation as primary constraints for an enterprise looking to adopt AI.Productivity gainsOpenAI said its analysis was based on real-world, aggregated usage data from its enterprise customers. It also conducted a survey of 9,000 workers across nearly 100 enterprises.Over 75 per cent of workers reported that using AI at work has improved either the speed or quality of their output. While some employees said they were able to save 40-60 minutes per day by using AI tools, heavy users reported saving more than 10 hours per week.AI tools also helped 87 per cent of IT workers report faster IT issue resolution, 85 per cent of marketing and product users report faster campaign execution, and 75 per cent of HR professionals report improved employee engagement.Story continues below this adVibe coding, frontier firmsOn the rise of vibe coding, OpenAI said that the volume of coding-related messages from workers outside of technical roles increased by 36 per cent, with 75 per cent of users reporting being able to complete new tasks they previously could not perform.Additionally, 73 per cent of engineers also reported faster code delivery after adopting AI tools.The company also said that frontier firms, organisations comprising hybrid teams of humans and agents, saw greater returns on time savings and productivity as compared to median firms.According to OpenAI, frontier firms send 2 times more messages per seat and show deeper integration of AI across teams. “Frontier workers send 6x more messages than the median employee and engage more intensively across advanced capabilities,” it said.Story continues below this adOther key findingsThe use of ChatGPT Projects and Custom GPTs for structured workflows has increased 19x in the past year, which indicates a shift in user behaviour from casual querying to integrated and repeatable processes, OpenAI said.The company also said that enterprises are also relying more on advanced AI reasoning models since average reasoning token consumption per organisation has increased by approximately 320x in the past 12 months.Technology, healthcare, and manufacturing have been identified as the fastest growing sectors in terms of AI adoption, while AI tools have been deployed on the largest scale in professional services, finance, and technology.Interestingly, India ranks as one of the largest markets for ChatGPT overall, but not in the enterprise segment.Story continues below this adCountries such as Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, and France saw 140 per cent year‑over‑year growth, making them the fastest‑growing business customer bases. Globally, OpenAI’s API offering saw more than 70 per cent growth in the last six months with Japan having the largest number of corporate API customers outside of the US.