OpenAI Codex expands with enterprise AI tools as knowledge workers surge to 5 million users

OpenAI launches new Codex tools for white-collar work

OpenAI is getting serious about courting enterprise users. On Tuesday, the AI lab released a new set of capabilities for Codex, meant to expand the agentic tool's uses in the workplace. Together with the new tools, the company released an internal report on how Codex is being used for knowledge work, finding its uses go far beyond software engineering. "Codex now has more than 5 million weekly active users, up more than 6x since the launch of the desktop app in February," reads a blog post introducing the report. "While developers remain the largest user group, knowledge workers now represent about 20 percent of users and are growing more than three times as fast." To further court those users, OpenAI released a set of six plug-ins aimed at specific jobs: data analytics, creative production, sales, product design, equity investing, and investment banking. Available from within the Codex app, each of the new tools bundles integrations, instructions, and context to allow Codex to approximate a specific job. Like any AI tool, the plug-ins will grow more effective with user customization, but they're meant to be effective tools out of the box. The new tools come after a similar push for agentic plugins from Anthropic, which launched its Enterprise Agents program in February. (A more specific set of finance-oriented agents launched in May.) With its traditional consumer focus, OpenAI has been slower to court enterprise customers, only introducing plugin support for Codex in March. Together with the plug-ins, OpenAI introduced a new Sites feature, which allows Codex to output its work product as a hosted interactive website, instead of just a local file. As part of that system, OpenAI is partnering with Wix, Base44, Replit, Lovable, Figma, and Emergent -- although the company plans to develop a larger partner ecosystem to support the service. A new Annotations feature will also allow users to designate a specific part of a document or file within Codex, allowing for more specific commands and context operations. The new enterprise features come just three weeks after OpenAI launched a new joint venture for enterprise clients, dubbed the OpenAI Deployment Company. The venture includes more than $4 billion in funding from global investment firms, with the aim of integrating OpenAI tools more deeply into businesses around the world. "AI is becoming capable of doing increasingly meaningful work inside organizations," OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser said in a statement at launch. "The challenge now is helping companies integrate these systems into the infrastructure and workflows that power their businesses."

Exclusive: Office workers embrace OpenAI's Codex

Why it matters: AI has made it easier to crank out documents, emails, decks and dashboards, and OpenAI is now betting agents can help workers make sense of them. The big picture: Previous waves of workplace software encouraged workers to produce huge volumes of files and messages, but those "workplace artifacts" largely remain siloed inside different software programs. * The report argues that Codex can round up the important context from all of those artifacts no matter where they are. By the numbers: Codex now has more than 4 million weekly active users, up more than five times since OpenAI launched the desktop app in February, the company says. * The fastest-growing tasks among knowledge workers are data analysis, up 110% week over week; research, up 37%; and knowledge artifacts -- reports, memos, docs, contracts, multimedia assets, PDFs and spreadsheets -- up 36%. * More than 60% of users now run more than one Codex task at the same time at some point during the day, up from less than half in mid-April. Case in point: Codex can connect to your email, calendar, documents, spreadsheets, design apps and messaging apps like Slack and Teams. * It only takes one click to set up a daily automation that can send a morning brief that includes what's on your calendar, important unread emails, and anything else that Codex thinks needs your attention. Catch up quick: Anthropic's Claude Code and Cowork were the first agentic tools to attract non-coders at scale. * Anthropic released Claude Code in October 2025. Over the winter holidays, dabblers used their extra hours to experiment with it. * Claude Code went viral in the new year and Claude itself coded the more office-focused app called Cowork. OpenAI released the Codex desktop app the following month. The other side: A growing number of power users say agentic tools are leaving them mentally fried, as they try to supervise several fast-moving AI workstreams at once. * OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, now at Anthropic, told the "No Priors" podcast he had been in a "state of AI psychosis" since December, trying to figure out what was possible and "pushing it to the limit." * Quentin Rousseau, CTO and co-founder of incident management platform Rootly, says using agents like Codex and Claude Code means getting more done. But, he says, the satisfaction that comes from a typical hard day's work is a lot different than the stress of managing agents. * "It's kind of like the difference between running a marathon and watching, a really gripping TV series," he told Axios in March. "One tires you out and the other keeps you up all night." Zoom in: Andrew Hall, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, tells Axios that he and his students use coding agents like Codex and Claude Code to help with boilerplate academic tasks, data collection, statistical analysis and running code to process data. * Earlier this year Hall asked Claude Code to update a paper he'd published five years ago on universal vote by mail. "We figured papers like this should be updated over time, but no one ever does that," he says. The tool gathered new data, ran analyses, produced figures and tables and drafted a new paper, "with not very much prompting," Hall said. * But when Hall hired a graduate student to audit the work manually, the agent's limits became clear. "It didn't do everything right," Hall said. "It did a lot right, which is kind of remarkable, but it made a number of errors." * The tool failed to collect all the data it needed and didn't quite code all the data correctly, he said, meaning it "very much needed an expert, PhD-level student to oversee it quite closely." The bottom line: OpenAI is trying to reframe Codex from a tool for developers into something closer to an operating system for knowledge work.

OpenAI's Codex update lets agents build interactive enterprise workspaces via Sites and role-specific plugins

Agentic AI is moving rapidly from the developer terminal to the corporate world. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a major update of its agentic AI platform Codex, introducing domain-specific workflows, a rapid, semi-private web hosting feature within it for enterprises called "Sites," and an in-place editing tool named "Annotations". The release marks a deliberate strategy to transform Codex from a specialized programming assistant into an everyday operating environment for business professionals. Non-developers -- including financial analysts, marketers, operators, and researchers -- now constitute approximately 20% of the platform's 5 million weekly users and are adopting the technology three times faster than traditional engineers, according to research shared by OpenAI with VentureBeat and other outlets. OpenAI is capitalizing on this shift to position Codex as the premier application for white-collar task automation. The timing of the announcement is highly strategic, arriving precisely as its own primary investor turned business rival Microsoft this week kicks off its annual BUILD developer conference in San Francisco -- where a slate of competing enterprise productivity tools is expected -- and hot on the heels of Anthropic's rapid adoption among knowledge-workers via its Claude Cowork and Claude Code platorms. Annotations enable more precise agentic AI spreadsheet edits and updates For business users, the most critical technical upgrade is the elimination of full-document regeneration. Previously, instructing an AI to update a specific chart or spreadsheet calculation often meant the model had to rewrite the entire file, which frequently broke custom formatting or introduced hallucinations. OpenAI addresses this through Annotations, a localized context-scoping mechanism. As demonstrated in the company's release materials, the platform maps a document's underlying data schema. When a user highlights a specific segment -- such as a block of cells in a financial model -- Codex isolates those exact data arrays. If an analyst prompts the system to "Add a chart of revenue, EBITDA, and net income over the selected years," the model executes the code strictly within that boundary, generating the visualization while leaving the surrounding cell dependencies, styles, and unselected formulas completely untouched. New role-specific Plugins for enterprise functions that bundle skills and external SaaS app connections To further anchor Codex in daily enterprise operations, OpenAI has introduced modular software bundles and a rapid-prototyping hosting environment. The company is rolling out six role-specific plugins that aggregate 62 popular business applications (including Snowflake, Figma, and Salesforce) and 110 automated skills straight out of the box. * Data Analytics: Unifies cloud environments like Snowflake, Databricks Genie, Hex, and Tableau to translate natural language inquiries into data reports and change-analysis dashboards. * Creative Production: Connects Figma, Canva, Shutterstock, Picsart, and Fal to generate and iterate on ad variations, campaign boards, and e-commerce assets directly from text briefs. * Sales: Integrates pipeline infrastructure across Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Outreach, Clay, Rox, and Actively to automate follow-up communications, close plans, and account risk reviews. * Product Design: Bridges Figma and Canva environments to audit live user journeys and transform static wireframes into clickable prototypes. * Public Equity & Investment Banking: Syncs institutional market feeds -- including Moody's, Daloopa, Datasite, FactSet, LSEG, S&P, PitchBook, and Hebbia -- to streamline financial modeling, competitive landscaping, and pitch book preparation. These integrations allow distinct departments -- from data analytics and creative production to sales and investment banking -- to automate complex, multi-step workflows without requiring IT to build custom API connections. Sites allow users to spin-up dynamic, hosted webpages they can share with their colleagues Concurrently, the new Sites feature introduces an interactive canvas that converts static data inputs or text documents into functional, web-hosted internal applications. Rolling out in preview for Business and Enterprise tiers, Sites allow cross-functional teams to bypass front-end development. Financial leaders, for example, can transform a static spreadsheet into an interactive scenario planner shared via a secure workspace URL, allowing executives to tweak assumptions in a live web app rather than clicking through document tabs. Instead of static decks, Sites promise to keep enterprises updated on their latest metrics and important information in an easily digestible way. Availability & deployment A critical operational distinction in this rollout centers on exactly where these new features can be executed. Codex's existing infrastructure runs natively across multiple surfaces, including IDE extensions and the terminal command line. However, the release documentation notes that Sites are rolling out "through the Codex app" and that plugins are managed via a "Codex plugin directory". An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that Plugins and Sites are available int he CLI and desktop app, while Sites are hosted by OpenAI. Licensing and pricing These updates operate entirely within OpenAI's closed, proprietary enterprise licensing model. Unlike open-source frameworks, enterprise clients do not maintain code-level ownership over Codex's integration nodes. Instead, system administrators manage deployment through centralized workspace settings, giving them explicit authority to enable or disable hosted "Sites" and restrict underlying application permissions. These new capabilities deploy seamlessly on top of Codex's existing commercial framework. Users will continue to access the agent via established baseline subscription tiers -- such as the individual "Plus" plan ($20/month) or the high-volume "Pro" plan ($100/month) -- or through a separate, seat-free pay-as-you-go model that draws down pre-purchased utility credits.