OpenAI: EU small-business agent use grew 8.1x since May…

A new OpenAI Economic Research report shows weekly active agent users among EU SMBs hit 8.1 times their May level by October 5 — while top-decile firms generate four times more output per user than typical ones.

Weekly active users of Codex and ChatGPT Work among EU small and mid-sized businesses hit 8.1 times their May level by October 5, according to an OpenAI Economic Research report published Wednesday. The headline number flatters the real story, which is a widening gap between firms that use agents casually and firms that run them as production infrastructure.

OpenAI defines SMBs here as accounts with 200 or fewer associated users. Growth is broad: Belgium up 12.1x from an early-May baseline, Italy 10.8x, Luxembourg 10x, per the ANI summary of the report carried by Tribune India. More than half of output tokens across OpenAI’s EU enterprise and business sample now come through Codex and ChatGPT Work, the latter launched only in July. Country-level agentic share spans from 22% in Slovenia to 85% in Lithuania, with Cyprus at 81% and Hungary at 79%.

The depth story is where it gets interesting. OpenAI defines “frontier firms” as the top 10% of accounts by output tokens per active user. In September, those EU frontier firms generated more than four times the per-user output of typical EU firms. Global frontier firms outside the EU generated more than twice what their EU counterparts did.

“More than half of the AI use among our EU enterprise and business customers now involves these tools, and the number of small business users has grown 8x across the region,” OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said.

This is the same breadth-versus-depth split the OECD flagged last week, and it rhymes with how agents are quietly becoming the first step in buyer research. Everyone’s logging in. A thin slice is actually shipping work. OpenAI didn’t disclose its EU sample size.

OpenAI: EU small-business agent use grew 8.1x since May, but frontier firms are lapping the field

Sources