Samsung Electronics is rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to more than 120,000 employees worldwide, turning one of OpenAI’s biggest corporate wins into a very visible test of how far AI can spread inside a global hardware giant. The deal covers Samsung workers in South Korea and the company’s Device Experience division around the world, with the tools aimed at everyday tasks from searching and writing to data analysis and product work.
The size of the ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex deployment matters because Samsung is not a neat software startup with a few thousand employees and a single workflow to automate. At the end of 2024, the company said it had about 262,000 employees globally, including around 51,000 in DX and about 78,000 in DS, so this is less a pilot and more an attempt to weave AI into a sprawling industrial machine.
What Samsung employees will use ChatGPT for
Samsung says the rollout spans software development, marketing, product development, and manufacturing, which is a reminder that enterprise AI is no longer being sold as a coding assistant with a fancy logo. It is being positioned as a general-purpose layer for internal work, and that shift is exactly why deals like this are getting bigger: the ROI pitch gets easier when one tool can touch multiple teams instead of just engineering.
- Search for information
- Analyze data
- Write documents
- Develop creative ideas and solutions
Codex is no longer just for developers
Codex started life as a software development tool, but OpenAI now describes it as a broader platform that also supports non-technical roles and internal business automation. That is a useful bit of rebranding, and a slightly dangerous one: once a coding tool becomes a company-wide workflow engine, the stakes around access, governance, and error handling rise fast.
OpenAI said weekly active Codex users have passed 5 million, with usage in South Korea up nearly 800% since February. Those figures show how quickly enterprise adoption is moving once a model is embedded in office routines rather than treated as a novelty demo.
Security and control are the selling points
OpenAI said the enterprise version of ChatGPT has been strengthened with data protection, user-permission controls, and security management features so Samsung can keep usage aligned with internal policy. That is the real subtext here: big companies do want powerful AI, but they want it wrapped in enough admin controls that legal, security, and IT teams do not stage a mutiny.
For OpenAI, the Samsung deal is also a signal to other corporate buyers watching the market: if a company of this scale is willing to standardize on ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex, smaller rivals will feel pressure to follow or explain why they are not. The next question is whether similar deployments stay broad and enthusiastic, or quickly become narrow, heavily managed systems that look more impressive on a press release than in daily use.