Enterprise Signals: What Frontier Firms Are Doing Differently

Frontier firms in the top 10% of enterprise AI usage now generate 8.3x more output tokens per active user than typical firms, up from 2.6x in January 2026, indicating a rapidly widening performance gap. As of June 2026, agentic AI (Codex) accounts for 64% of combined enterprise output tokens, reflecting a structural shift from AI-assisted question-answering to autonomous task execution. Adoption of advanced capabilities like Plugins is 21% among frontier firm users versus 9% at typical firms, with OpenAI's own employees at 95% weekly usage, signaling significant headroom. Agentic tool usage has expanded sharply beyond engineering into legal (108x growth), sales (41x), and recruiting (41x) since February. The key differentiator is not model access, which is equal across firms, but depth of deployment: providing agents with context, tools, and persistence to complete complex, multi-step work.