OpenAI's latest Enterprise Signals shows enterprise AI moving from assistance to execution at sharply different speeds. Frontier firms (those with the top 10% of AI usage) now generate 8.3× as many output tokens per active user as typical firms, up from 2.6× in January. The widening gap points to a deeper operating shift: leading firms connect agents to company context and tools, delegate more substantive work, and make successful workflows easier to repeat.

Startups Basis, Clay, and Exa Labs have built agents into employee onboarding, account management, and developer ecosystem growth. At Basis, first-day onboarding now takes 30 minutes instead of two hours, with Codex and a company-specific onboarding skill handling integration setup automatically. Clay uses persistent subagents for each account that review deal context overnight and generate daily priority lists for sales teams. Exa Labs aims to make its search API available wherever developers could use it.

For leaders, the challenge is turning that depth into work people can trust, measure, and improve. Leaders should leave room for experimentation, including use cases whose value is not obvious on the first try. These examples show how teams can build agents into familiar work and improve the process over time.