Enterprise

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Small Business program as agentic tools hit 10 million weekly users

A new SMB push wraps ChatGPT Work into virtual training, in-person academies, and partner tie-ups with Dropbox, Shopify, Slack, and Intuit — as OpenAI discloses combined weekly usage of Work and Codex.

By Asher Glick · Enterprise software desk · 2026-07-22 · 4 min read

Photo: Wikimedia Commons / TED Conference, CC BY 2.0 — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaking on stage at TED in April 2025

OpenAI on Tuesday launched a ChatGPT for Small Businesses program, wrapping virtual webinars, in-person OpenAI Academy sessions, interactive guides, and partner promotions from Dropbox, Shopify, Intuit, Slack, Atlassian, and Wix into a single onboarding funnel aimed at the accounting, marketing, and ecommerce workflows that dominate SMB software spend.

The framing is training. The purpose is conversion.

Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s CFO, said in April that 95% of the company’s 900 million weekly ChatGPT users don’t pay. Since she joined in 2024, business revenue’s share of the total has roughly doubled to around 40%, per Inc. At an $852 billion valuation and with an IPO widely expected, the math on the remaining 855 million free-tier users is the single most important commercial question inside the company. An SMB academy is the cheapest legible answer.

Alongside the program, OpenAI disclosed that the agentic side of ChatGPT, meaning Codex and ChatGPT Work combined, has passed 10 million weekly users. The figure was first reported by Bloomberg, is a company estimate rather than an audited metric, and doesn’t count enterprise seats. It arrives less than two weeks after ChatGPT Work debuted on July 9 as a desktop, web, and mobile workplace companion running on the GPT-5.6 model family (Sol, Terra, Luna). OpenAI also said more than 1 million users are now applying Codex outside software development, and that agentic usage rose roughly 2.5x in the week after GPT-5.6 shipped.

Named ChatGPT Work launch customers include Zapier, RingCentral, Virgin Atlantic, and Nvidia, with finance teams reportedly using the tools to compress month-end reporting and forecasting cycles, per InfoWorld. Those are exactly the workflows the SMB program’s partner catalog, Intuit for books, Shopify for storefronts, Slack for coordination, is designed to seed further down the customer-size curve.

The pattern is familiar from an earlier era of enterprise software: Salesforce’s mid-2000s AppExchange and Microsoft’s Office small-business bundles both used partner ecosystems as distribution wedges into fragmented SMB markets. The OpenAI version compresses the sales cycle into a webinar and an academy seat. Ten million weekly agentic users is the number OpenAI wants investors to hold in mind. Ninety-five percent unpaid is the one it’s trying to move.

Sources