Codex Enables Non-Technical Workers to Perform Complex Tasks
OpenAI's latest research reveals that its agentic AI tool Codex is not only making workers faster, but also enabling them to perform entirely different jobs. The study, released on June 25, tracked Codex usage between August 2025 and June 2026 and found significant changes in job boundaries.
Between these dates, non-developer token consumption surged 137-fold among individual users and 189-fold among groups, with Codex accounting for 99.8% of all weekly output tokens by June 2026. The research also showed that over 25% of Codex work performed by business-function employees involved engineering or coding tasks.
People in legal, finance, and recruiting departments were found to be effectively crossing into technical territory that would have required hiring a developer just a year earlier. The study noted that about 80.6% of surveyed users made at least one Codex request estimated at over 30 minutes of equivalent human work.
When considering the potential impact on crypto labor markets, OpenAI's research highlights geographic divergence in automation risk between Europe and the US. This has implications for companies deciding where to locate talent and operations.