AI Saves Workers Up to an Hour a Day, OpenAI Report Finds

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Enterprises using generative artificial intelligence at scale are saving between 40 and 60 minutes per employee per day, with engineers, data scientists and communications teams reporting gains of up to 80 minutes, according to a 2025 report by OpenAI on the state of enterprise AI.

The time savings are now translating into faster product cycles, higher conversion rates and measurable cost reductions, even as large gaps open up between AI leaders and laggards.

The report draws on de-identified usage data from more than one million business customers, along with a survey of 9,000 workers across nearly 100 enterprises worldwide.

It shows enterprise AI usage moving rapidly from experimentation into daily workflows. Since November 2024, weekly enterprise message volumes on ChatGPT have grown eightfold, while the average worker is sending 30% more messages. OpenAI now serves over seven million ChatGPT workplace seats, with ChatGPT Enterprise subscriptions rising nearly nine times year over year.

The productivity gains are no longer confined to technical teams. Accounting and finance users reported the largest per-message benefits, followed by analytics, communications and engineering. About 87% of IT workers said AI helped them resolve issues faster, 85% of marketing and product users reported quicker campaign execution, 75% of HR professionals saw better employee engagement and 73% of engineers delivered code faster.

AI is also pushing technical work beyond traditional job boundaries. Three quarters of surveyed workers said they can now perform tasks they previously could not, including coding, spreadsheet automation and building internal AI agents.

Coding-related messages outside engineering, IT and research functions have jumped 36% in just six months, showing how non-technical teams are increasingly taking on analytical and development work.

The financial implications are starting to surface in external research as well. A 2025 study by Boston Consulting Group cited in the OpenAI report found that companies classified as AI leaders delivered 1.7 times faster revenue growth, 3.6 times higher total shareholder returns and 1.6 times stronger EBIT margins than peers over the past three years.

Yet the benefits are not evenly distributed. The OpenAI data shows a widening divide between frontier users and the median employee. Workers in the top 5% of AI adoption generate six times more messages than the median user and use advanced data analysis tools 16 times more often.

In coding, the gap widens to 17 times. At the firm level, frontier companies generate twice as many AI messages per employee and seven times more messages to custom GPTs than the median enterprise, indicating much deeper workflow integration.

Geographic and industry adoption patterns also diverge. Technology, healthcare and manufacturing are now the fastest growing sectors for enterprise AI, with year-over-year customer growth of 11 times, eight times and seven times, respectively. In absolute usage, professional services, finance and technology remain the largest users. International adoption is accelerating sharply, with business customer growth exceeding 143% year over year in Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands and France, outpacing the global average.

The report includes detailed case studies that tie AI deployment directly to operational results. At customer service company Intercom, a real-time voice AI agent built using OpenAI’s Realtime API cut response latency by 48% and now resolves 53% of customer calls end-to-end without human intervention. For calls that still require a human agent, resolution times fell by 40%, translating into hundreds of millions of dollars in annual cost savings given typical support costs.

Home improvement retailer Lowe’s rolled out its Mylow and Mylow Companion AI assistants across more than 1,700 stores and its digital platforms. The system now answers nearly one million customer and associate questions per month. When shoppers use Mylow during online visits, conversion rates more than double, while in-store customer satisfaction scores rise by 200 basis points when associates rely on the companion tool.

The report finds that organizations seeing the strongest returns share several operating traits. They give AI secure access to internal systems to enable context-aware automation, standardize and reuse AI-driven workflows, invest in executive sponsorship and data readiness, and manage organizational change deliberately. About one quarter of enterprises still have not enabled secure data connectors, a gap that continues to limit their ability to deploy AI beyond surface-level productivity tasks.

Despite the rapid gains, OpenAI’s chief economist Ronnie Chatterji said enterprise AI is still in its early phase and the largest economic effects lie ahead as firms shift from asking models for outputs to delegating complex, multi-step workflows.