A new OpenAI report showed that artificial intelligence saves employees an average of 40 to 60 minutes of working time per day. This data may disappoint those who expected radical changes in labor productivity due to AI technologies.
The study "The State of Corporate AI in 2025" is based on anonymized usage data from over 1 million business clients and a survey of 9,000 employees from nearly 100 organizations. The document presents a picture of the growing adoption and integration of AI in the workplace.
Growing popularity with modest results
According to the report, 75% of workers report that using AI at work has improved either the speed or quality of their output. The same number of users state that they can now perform new tasks that were previously unavailable to them.
However, the actual productivity metrics turned out to be more modest than expected. In a workday filled with meetings, emails, and numerous tools, the saved hour may seem like a minimal benefit rather than a radical shift in productivity.
The implementation of AI in companies is indeed growing rapidly. The weekly number of messages in ChatGPT Enterprise has increased nearly eightfold over the past year, and the use of structured workflows, such as custom GPTs, has grown 19 times. Companies are also using more complex queries — the use of reasoning tokens has increased by more than 320 times.
The gap between active and regular users
OpenAI data shows a growing gap between 'advanced' users and regular employees. 'Advanced' workers, who fall into the 95th percentile for usage intensity, send approximately six times more messages than average users.
These active users report a more significant time savings — over 10 hours a week. They create AI-based workflows, automate routine tasks, and turn the tool into a reliable colleague rather than a random assistant. However, even about 2 hours of saved time a day remains a relatively moderate figure.
Workers note that they complete certain tasks faster — for example, troubleshooting IT issues, creating campaigns, and improving code. However, everyday gains still average about an hour.
OpenAI presents the report as a snapshot of the current state of corporate AI, rather than a final verdict. The company suggests that future achievements may come not from the model itself, but from how organizations restructure processes and workflows around it.
For most workers, AI remains an assistant — useful but not revolutionary. It speeds up work and can make some tasks less tedious. However, the fact that an average employee saves less than an hour a day indicates a technology that is powerful but still limited. The main question is whether these metrics will continue to grow, or if the hour a day is closer to the ceiling of capabilities than AI enthusiasts would like to admit.
