Exclusive: Codex agents are inching into the mainstream

Frontier AI labs have spent years promising that agents would handle your work for you — and according to a new study by OpenAI, Columbia, Duke, and the University of Pennsylvania, shared exclusively with Axios, that reality is arriving. Usage of Codex, OpenAI's agentic work platform, is accelerating among organizations and power users alike. Outside OpenAI, organizational adoption jumped from virtually zero percent in August twenty twenty-five to seventeen percent today. Among individual Codex users — still a small group — the commitment is striking: seventy percent have delegated at least one hour of human-equivalent work, and a quarter have handed over tasks estimated to take more than eight hours. Non-developers are now the fastest-growing user group, suggesting agents are shedding their technical reputation. But here's the reality check: among mainstream ChatGPT consumers, fewer than one percent are actually using agents. The broader shift began at the start of twenty twenty-six, when platforms began letting users grant AI agents access to desktops, calendars, files, and browsers.

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