Knowledge workers now represent roughly one-fifth of OpenAI's Codex users, growing more than three times as fast as developers, according to a new company report shared exclusively with Axios. The finding signals a significant shift in the AI assistant's user base beyond its original coding focus.
Codex has amassed more than 4 million weekly active users, a fivefold increase since the desktop app launched in February. The fastest-growing tasks among knowledge workers include data analysis (up 110% week over week), research (up 37%), and creating documents, memos, and other workplace artifacts (up 36%).
OpenAI is betting that agents can help workers make sense of the vast number of files, emails, and dashboards they produce, which have historically remained siloed across different software programs. The report argues Codex can round up important context from all those artifacts regardless of location.
More than 60% of users now run multiple Codex tasks simultaneously at some point during the day, up from less than half previously. The trend suggests a growing comfort with multitasking AI agents as workplace productivity tools.
The shift raises questions about the reliability of AI-generated workplace content and the potential for errors propagating across interconnected tasks. Without careful oversight, increased adoption could amplify mistakes rather than streamline workflows.