This week's chart comes from a fascinating internal study from OpenAI, tracking how its own staff use AI agents. It shows the change in median output tokens per person by job function, normalised to 1x on 1 November 2025. By June 2026 the median researcher generates 56 times more output, with customer support at 32x, engineering at 27x and legal at 13x. The engine is Codex, now 99.8% of weekly output tokens generated inside the company, with non-developer use among staff up 12 times since August.
In our article on AI costs we argued the real measure is the cost of an outcome, not the token. This is borne out by OpenAI's data. The volumes are rising because the unit of work has changed. Nearly a quarter of Codex requests now represent tasks that would take a human over an hour. Agentic work multiplies token use many times over.