OpenAI says agents shift work from prompts to delegated tasks

OpenAI describes a shift from short prompts to longer delegated tasks. A typical chatbot answers one question. An agent can work for minutes or hours, call tools, fix errors, verify output and gradually move toward a solution. OpenAI supports this argument with its own use of Codex. The data are striking. By August 2025, the average OpenAI employee used less than ten percent of their tokens on Codex. By June 2026, Codex accounted for more than 85 percent of the average employee’s output tokens and 99.8 percent of weekly output tokens inside the company. This is not only about developers. Legal, finance and recruiting teams moved to majority Codex use around April 2026. OpenAI says that by May 2026, 80.6 percent of a sample of individual users had submitted at least one request equivalent to more than 30 minutes of human work. 70.2 percent had submitted work exceeding one hour, and 25.6 percent had submitted a task exceeding eight hours. Growth among non-programmers was even steeper. The business impact is twofold. On one side, agents can shorten work that previously waited for a technical team: spreadsheet automation, data transformation, tool tuning, simple internal applications and structured analysis. On the other side, work management changes. If a lawyer or recruiter delegates a technical task to an agent, the company must know who checks the result and who is responsible for an error. This is therefore not only about productivity. A new internal economy of work is emerging, where some activities shift from human capacity to parallel agentic runs. The advantage will go to companies that embed agents into processes, not those that simply let them run without rules. Terms: An AI agent can plan and execute multiple steps toward a goal. Codex is OpenAI’s tool for coding and agentic technical tasks. An output token is a piece of text or code produced by a model.

OpenAI says agents shift work from prompts to delegated tasks

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