OpenAI launches ChatGPT small-business program, says Work and Codex hit 10 million users

OpenAI launched a ChatGPT for small business program on Monday and said ChatGPT Work and its Codex coding tool together have reached 10 million combined users, according to its announcement.

The program is a distribution play aimed at owners who lack in-house technical staff. It offers hands-on virtual training, in-person “small business AI academies” across the US, and access to new agents and integrations built with Dropbox, Shopify, Intuit, Slack, Atlassian and Wix, tools small firms already run their operations on.

The 10 million figure doubles Codex’s own user count from earlier in July, OpenAI said, though the company combined two products into one number rather than breaking them out, which makes the growth harder to attribute.

To make the case, OpenAI pointed to results from last year’s Small Business AI Jams: it said 78% of participants built a functional AI workflow in a single day, and 42% said they saved more than five hours a week using AI assistance. Those figures come from OpenAI’s own event and its participants’ self-reports, not an independent study, and the people who show up to an AI hackathon are not a representative sample of small-business owners.

The push lands as OpenAI, Google and Microsoft compete to embed AI assistants in the daily workflows of small firms, a large and largely untapped market. Whether the academies and integrations convert into sustained paid usage, rather than one-day workshop enthusiasm, is the metric that will matter.