The State of Enterprise AI in 2025, What Leaders Need to Know
In 2025, artificial intelligence has moved beyond early experimentation and is now beginning to deliver real, measurable impact inside companies, but the journey is uneven, with a growing gap between leading adopters and the rest of the market. This is the central message of The State of Enterprise AI report, published by OpenAI and based on usage data from more than one million business customers combined with a survey of 9,000 workers across nearly 100 enterprises.
AI Adoption Is Rapid and Deepening
Enterprise AI adoption is not just increasing in sheer numbers, it’s also becoming more embedded in daily work. Over the past year, ChatGPT Enterprise usage has grown approximately 8×, and workers are using the tool more intensively than ever before. This shift reflects a move from casual, ad-hoc interactions to integrated, repeatable workflows, including the use of structured projects and custom models tailored for specific business processes.
This trend suggests AI is evolving from a fringe experimentation tool into an operational workforce multiplier, one that teams turn to repeatedly to improve performance and tackle complex tasks.
Employees Are Seeing Tangible Value
One of the clearest indicators of progress comes from workers themselves. In the survey, 75 % of respondents reported that AI made their work faster or better, with typical users saving 40–60 minutes per day. Heavy users reported even greater time savings, in some cases more than 10 hours per week.
Crucially, AI isn’t just accelerating existing work. Many employees are using it to perform new kinds of work they couldn’t do before. For example, non-technical roles are engaging more with coding-related tasks, and professionals across functions report improvements in areas like IT support, marketing execution, HR engagement, and engineering output.
In practical terms, this means that AI is closing the gap between ideas and execution. Workers are able to translate concepts into results - regardless of traditional technical skills - leading to broader and deeper value creation.
Growth Across Industries and Borders
The adoption of enterprise AI is global and cross-sector. Technology, healthcare, and manufacturing are among the fastest-growing sectors in terms of usage, while markets like Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, and France have seen particularly strong year-over-year increases. International API (application programming interface) adoption has surged, expanding how companies embed AI capabilities directly into their products and systems.
This growth highlights that AI’s value isn’t limited to Silicon Valley or tech giants - it’s resonating across diverse geographies and industries.
Leaders Are Pulling Ahead
One of the most important findings is the widening performance gap between organisations and workers who adopt AI deeply (“frontier users”) and those who don’t. Frontier workers send roughly 6× more AI requests than average users, and frontier organisations integrate AI twice as deeply across teams.
This suggests that the real value of AI comes from depth of integration, not just access. Organisations that weave AI into core workflows, decision making, and product development are seeing disproportionate benefits — and this gap is likely to widen unless other firms accelerate their adoption.
What It Means for Business Leaders
The report makes one thing clear: enterprise AI is here, and it’s maturing quickly. But AI’s impact depends less on the technology itself and more on how organisations adopt and embed it into work. Early gains are already material, time savings, expanded capabilities, and cross-functional benefits, but the future of value creation will be shaped by companies that:
Treat AI as a strategic enabler, not just a tool
Embed AI into repeatable, high-impact workflows
Build capability at all levels to use AI effectively
As AI becomes foundational infrastructure inside organisations — much like databases or the internet once did, those who master deployment, change management, and execution will gain a lasting competitive advantage.