OpenAI + Five Academics Link 17M ChatGPT Enterprise Logs to Company Financials: Adopters Have 10x the Market Cap, and Juniors Are the Heaviest Users

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A 69-page working paper released August 12 by Aaron Chatterji, David Holtz and colleagues joins over 17 million real ChatGPT Enterprise usage records to employee seniority, task category, and public-company financials. Token consumption grew ~7x between June 2025 and March 2026, with ~4x growth even among pre-June-2025 customers — meaning most growth is existing customers deepening usage, not new logos. Two findings cut against the prevailing narrative: junior employees with a few years of experience are the most intensive users at every level, and adopters' median revenue, market cap and R&D spend are all roughly 10x non-adopters, with top-decile 'frontier firms' producing 8.3x the output tokens per active user.