OpenAI's latest report makes a blunt claim: European companies are moving from asking AI questions to assigning it work. On October 14, 2026, OpenAI Economic Research published its study of agentic use in the EU, finding that among its EU enterprise customers, the coding tool Codex and the agentic product ChatGPT Work together now account for more than half of all output tokens. Most of what the models produce, in other words, is no longer answers — it is completed tasks.
Small businesses are growing fastest, in every member state
The sharpest growth sits with small and medium businesses, which OpenAI defines as firms with 200 or fewer associated users. Since May 2026, weekly active users of Codex and ChatGPT Work among EU small businesses have grown more than eightfold, with increases in every member state. Agentic use is no longer a big-company pilot; it is reaching small teams that need automation to cover thin staffing. The eightfold figure needs its caveat, though: the report gives no absolute user count for May, so how much of the surge reflects a low starting base cannot be judged from what was published.
A near fourfold gap between countries, and another twofold gap at the frontier
Within the same enterprise sample, the spread is striking. Measured by the share of output tokens going through agentic products, Slovenia sits at 22% and Lithuania at 85%. OpenAI defines frontier firms as the top 10% by output tokens per active user: in September 2026, EU frontier firms generated more than four times the per-user output of typical EU firms, yet frontier firms outside the EU generated more than twice as much again as their EU counterparts. EU companies make up only 10% of frontier firms globally, below the EU's share of registered companies worldwide. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar frames the remedy as tools, skills and confidence, arguing Europe still has ample room to deepen use.
Read the numbers with their sample boundary in mind
The data is useful, but its limits matter: the sample covers only OpenAI's own ChatGPT Enterprise and Business customers, and token share measures intensity of use, not business outcomes — it is not a penetration rate for the whole EU economy. Companies willing to pay for enterprise plans are self-selected enthusiasts, and the Lithuania–Slovenia gap may partly reflect industry mix and customer composition. Even so, the directional signal holds: once more than half of a vendor's enterprise usage runs through products that execute tasks end to end, competition shifts from who answers best to whose agents finish work reliably, correctly and auditably. For European firms, the report's real question is whether their own usage still stops at questions or has reached execution — the productivity meaning of the two is entirely different.
