OpenAI is getting serious about courting enterprise users - presumably because they've run out of students to cheat on homework. 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. Shocking, we know - turns out AI can also pretend to be a banker.
“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.” So basically, developers still rule, but the spreadsheet crowd is catching up.
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 - because who has time to train an AI when you could be training a human?
The new tools come after a similar push for agentic plug-ins 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 plug-in support for Codex in March. Slow and steady wins the race, unless you're racing against Anthropic.
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. Because nothing says “enterprise-ready” like a partnership with a company called “Lovable.”
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. Because sometimes you need to tell an AI to focus on the part of the spreadsheet that doesn't make you cry.
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. That's a lot of zeros for a company that still can't reliably tell you the weather.
“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.” Translation: We built the robot; you figure out where to plug it in.