EU businesses embrace agentic AI, but adoption varies widely

OpenAI Economic Research highlights the growing use of agentic AI tools across EU businesses, with enterprises and small businesses increasingly relying on agents to perform tasks. In the EU, Codex and ChatGPT Work now account for over half of output tokens, with agentic use already representing a significant share of activity among ChatGPT Enterprise customers. Small and medium businesses, defined as those with 200 or fewer associated users, have seen weekly active users of Codex and ChatGPT Work grow more than eightfold since May 2026, with growth observed in all member states. However, adoption remains uneven across the EU. In the sample of ChatGPT Enterprise accounts, output token generation through Codex and ChatGPT Work ranged from 22% in Slovenia to 8,5% in Lithuania. Frontier firms, defined as the top 10% by output tokens per active user, generated over four times as many output tokens per active user as typical EU firms in September 2026. Despite this, EU frontier firms still lag behind global counterparts, which generated more than twice as many tokens per user. EU-based firms also represent only 10% of global frontier firms, despite the EU's higher share of registered companies globally.