Three products, three different buyers
OpenAI sells three products to organisations, with the consumer ChatGPT app behind them. In March 2026 the company said ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million subscribers, both company-reported. Each product has a different buyer and a different rival.
ChatGPT Enterprise is the version a company buys for its staff. Inside it, ChatGPT Work is the company's new enterprise agent. It plans a task, takes actions across the company's apps and files and produces finished materials, using the tools, files and team processes the company has approved. Administrators decide who can use agents, connected tools and actions, and OpenAI says business data is not used to train its models by default. In Korea the product reaches buyers directly and through channel partners. Samsung SDS and LG CNS act as official resellers, while KT chose a separate strategic partnership model, according to press coverage of an April 2026 event.
The API lets a company's developers build OpenAI models into their own software. OpenAI said in March 2026 that its APIs process more than 15 billion tokens per minute, a company-reported rate at that date. Kakao's February 2025 announcement is the Korean example, with ChatGPT technology to be embedded in its services. The buyer is an engineering or product team, not an employee.
Codex is a coding agent. An engineer hands it a task in a code repository and checks the changes, logs and tests it returns. OpenAI's March 2026 release said Codex had over 2 million weekly users, up fivefold in three months. The Samsung announcement cites more than 5 million. Both are company-reported. Korea is where the company shows wider use: in May 2026 it said more than half of Codex requests in Korea came from non-development work such as writing, analysis, research and operations. The rival the press names is Anthropic's Claude Code. In July 2026 OpenAI's board chair, an interested party, said some customers who ran up very high Claude Code bills started looking for an alternative.
An engineer between product and customer
Between product and customer sits a role that appears on the Seoul list, the forward deployed engineer (FDE). OpenAI describes FDEs as engineers who lead complex deployments of its models in production alongside its most strategic customers, embed with customer teams and pass field feedback to Research and Product. The Seoul posting expects about 50% travel. OpenAI Korea put forward deployed engineering next to Codex and workspace agents at its first Exec Summit in May 2026.
What customers report, and its limits
The customer story with the most detail is Morgan Stanley's, and its limits matter. Before, the firm's assistant could answer 7,000 questions and document access stood at 20%. Afterwards it could answer questions across a corpus of 100,000 documents, access rose to 80% and over 98% of advisor teams used it. All of this is customer-reported, on an OpenAI page about a GPT-4 era deployment. It is scoped to advisor teams and is not an investment result.
Samsung Electronics made ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex available to all employees in Korea and all Device eXperience (DX) staff worldwide. Seoul National University gave ChatGPT Edu to faculty, students and staff from June 2026, and OpenAI Korea said in September that nearly 50,000 students and faculty use ChatGPT and Codex. Musinsa's CTO said Codex improved development speed and productivity.
Korea's customer evidence shows breadth and growth. Access (Samsung, Seoul National University) and usage growth (about 28-fold more ChatGPT Enterprise users at Korean organisations in a year, company-reported) are public. A candidate who can say which measure would persuade a Korean company to widen a deployment is answering a question the Seoul team is likely to face.