How frontier firms are pulling ahead

How frontier firms are pulling ahead

B2B Signals shows how the frontier advantage is beginning to compound for firms using AI more deeply, more broadly, and in more delegated workflows.

Key Takeaways

• Frontier firms—those at the 95th percentile of usage—now use 3.5x as much intelligence per worker as typical firms, up from 2x a year ago.
• The gap is about depth, not just activity: Message volume explains only 36% of the frontier advantage; most of the gap comes from richer, more complex AI use.
• Agentic workflows are becoming a frontier marker: The largest advantage shows up in advanced tools, with frontier firms sending 16x as many Codex messages per worker as typical firms.
• Organizations can move toward the frontier: Leading firms measure depth, build governance for production use, invest in enablement, scale what works, and move from chat-based assistance to delegated work with agents.

For many enterprises, the first phase of AI adoption was about access: who had AI tools, how many seats had been deployed, and whether employees were experimenting. That still matters. But access is no longer the differentiator.

Our latest research suggests the frontier advantage is beginning to compound. Frontier firms are pulling ahead because they use more intelligence per worker, adopt advanced tools more intensively, and embed AI more deeply into workflows.

Today, we’re introducing B2B Signals, a business extension of OpenAI Signals. It provides a recurring measure of how AI is diffusing across businesses, based on privacy-preserving, aggregated signals from enterprise use of OpenAI products.

Depth: The New Metric of Success

The clearest signal is depth. Frontier firms now use 3.5x as much intelligence per worker as typical firms. Workers at the frontier are asking AI to take on more complex work, providing richer context, and generating more substantive outputs.

In this report, we use tokens generated as a proxy for intelligence demanded. Tokens help measure how much work employees are asking AI to do, making them a useful proxy for the depth of AI use. Typical firms are using AI to answer questions; frontier firms are using it to help execute complex work.

The Move Toward Delegation

The advantage is largest in advanced and agentic tools. Codex shows the largest gap, with frontier firms sending 16x as many messages per worker as typical firms. ChatGPT Agent, Apps in ChatGPT, Deep Research, and GPTs show similar patterns, suggesting frontier firms are better at adopting tools that help workers code, delegate multi-step tasks, and conduct complex research.

Cisco uses Codex to speed up complex software work. In production workflows, Codex helped reduce build times by about 20%, save 1,500+ engineering hours per month, and increase defect-resolution throughput by 10-15x.

AI in Production Across Functions

AI use is broadest in writing, but function-specific usage is growing. IT and Security teams focus on procedural guidance, Software Development teams show high coding usage, and Finance teams use AI for analysis.

Travelers Insurance shows this in practice with its AI Claim Assistant, which guides customers through first notice of loss and creates claims directly inside Travelers’ systems. It is expected to handle approximately 100,000 calls in its first year.

Conclusion

The gap between frontier firms and typical firms is not a fixed divide. Organizations can move toward the frontier by measuring depth of use, building governance that enables production use, and moving beyond chat toward delegated work with agents.