Artificial intelligence saves workers less than an hour every day, a new OpenAI report shows


OpenAI 2025 “State of Enterprise AI” report. Provides an in-depth look at how companies use it Artificial intelligence tools Inside real companies. Drawing on anonymized usage data from more than one million business customers, along with a survey of 9,000 workers at nearly 100 organizations, the report presents a picture of the increasing adoption and integration of AI in the workplace.

“In the organizations surveyed, 75% of workers reported that using artificial intelligence at work improved the speed or quality of their production,” the report said. The report also says that “75% of users reported their ability to complete new tasks that they had not been able to perform previously.”

However, productivity gains may not be as global and widespread as expected: on average, ChatGPT Enterprise users save less than an hour of time per day, according to Report.

Below is a breakdown of the report’s main findings.


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The report shows productivity gains, but they are not universal

Atlas of Artificial Intelligence

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Despite the hype surrounding AI at work, the latest data from OpenAI suggests that the reality for most employees is modest. On average, ChatGPT Enterprise users save only about 40 to 60 minutes per active workday, the company says in its report.

This is nothing, but it is nowhere near the comprehensive productivity overhaul that many were hoping for. In a workday filled with meetings, emails, and tool overload, a recovered hour can feel like a minuscule benefit rather than a radical shift in productivity.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’s copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Some key findings

The report concludes that the adoption of AI within companies is growing rapidly. Weekly messages in ChatGPT Enterprise have increased nearly eight-fold in the past year, and the use of structured workflows, such as custom GPTs, has increased 19-fold. Companies are also pushing more complex claims, with the use of logical codes increasing more than 320-fold.

But the results are not expanding at the same rate. Workers say they complete certain tasks more quickly – e.g IT troubleshootingand campaign creation and coding improvements – but daily wins still add up to about an hour on average.

A gap between heavy AI users and everyone else

OpenAI data shows a widening gap between “borderline” users — which OpenAI defines as those in the 95th percentile of adoption intensity — and the average worker.

Frontier employees send six times more messages than average users. Unsurprisingly, these heavy users report greater gains over 10 hours per week. They are building workflows around AI, automating routine tasks and turning the tool into a dependable co-worker rather than an occasional assistant. Although it can be said that saving about two hours a day of time is still relatively moderate.

OpenAI is shaping the report as a snapshot of where enterprise AI stands today, rather than a final verdict. The company points out that future gains cannot come from the model itself, but from how organizations reshape processes and workflows around it.

But for most employees, AI is still an assistant. Helpful, but not transformative. It helps speed things up. It may even make some work less boring. But the typical worker who saves less than an hour a day indicates a powerful, but still limited, technology. The big question now is whether these numbers will continue to rise, or whether one hour per day is closer to the ceiling than AI enthusiasts want to admit.



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