According to OpenAI, Samsung will use the tools across research, manufacturing, marketing, and administration — putting the assistant in the hands of both engineers and non-technical staff. For OpenAI, the agreement secures a flagship reference customer at a moment when competition to land large corporate accounts has intensified sharply. For more context on this story, see our ongoing artificial intelligence updates.
The scope of the deployment
The deal covers two distinct groups inside Samsung. First, all employees based in South Korea — the company's home market and the center of its engineering operations — will receive access to ChatGPT Enterprise. Second, every employee in Samsung's Device eXperience (DX) division, the unit responsible for consumer products such as smartphones, televisions, and home appliances, will get access worldwide regardless of location.
Samsung plans to apply the tools broadly. Engineering teams can use Codex to write and review code, automate repetitive development tasks, and build internal software. Non-developers are expected to use ChatGPT for drafting documents, summarizing research, and supporting marketing and administrative workflows.
Codex moves beyond developers
A notable element of the announcement is how Samsung intends to use Codex, which began as a tool specifically for software developers. According to OpenAI, non-developers are increasingly adopting Codex to build internal tools and automated workflows without writing code from scratch. Codex recently gained a record-and-replay feature that lets a user walk through a task once, after which the AI can repeat the workflow on its own — lowering the barrier for employees who are not professional programmers.
The growth numbers underscore that shift. More than five million people now use Codex weekly worldwide, according to OpenAI. In South Korea specifically, active Codex users have jumped roughly 800 percent since February, a surge that helps explain why Samsung — and the broader Korean corporate sector — became a priority market for OpenAI.
A deepening Samsung-OpenAI relationship
The enterprise software deal layers on top of an existing hardware relationship. Samsung is already a key supplier of memory chips — including high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators — to OpenAI for its data-center infrastructure. The new agreement therefore ties the two companies together across both ends of the AI stack: Samsung supplies the physical components that train and run OpenAI's models, and OpenAI supplies the software that Samsung's workforce uses day to day.
Korea Times reported that the arrangement makes Samsung one of the most prominent ChatGPT Enterprise customers in Asia, and The Decoder noted that other major Korean organizations have followed a similar path. Existing OpenAI customers in the country include LG Electronics, the game publisher Krafton, the fintech firm Toss, and Seoul National University, according to OpenAI.
Why enterprise AI is the new battleground
The Samsung deal lands amid a broader land grab for corporate AI accounts. Companies across industries are trying to figure out which assistant to standardize on, and vendors are competing aggressively on security, data privacy, and integration with existing workplace tools. ChatGPT Enterprise is marketed partly on the assurance that customer data is not used to train OpenAI's models — a feature that matters to companies handling sensitive manufacturing and product information.
For Samsung, standardizing on a single AI platform offers the promise of consistency and centralized oversight, but it also concentrates risk. Large deployments raise questions about data governance, employee training, and how productivity gains are actually measured. Samsung has not publicly disclosed the financial terms of the agreement or specific targets for adoption.
The competitive context
OpenAI's rivals are pursuing similar enterprise strategies. Anthropic has built momentum selling its Claude models and Claude Code tool to businesses, while Google has pushed its Gemini products through its existing cloud and productivity relationships. According to reporting from Bloomberg, relayed via PYMNTS, some DeepMind executives have internally raised concerns that Google lacks an obvious, compelling offering for companies seeking AI coding tools — precisely the segment where Codex is now being deployed at scale.
That competitive gap makes Samsung's choice of OpenAI a data point worth watching. When one of the world's largest electronics companies commits to a particular AI vendor for its global workforce, it sends a signal to other large employers about which platforms are considered mature enough for mission-critical use.
What comes next
Samsung's deployment begins in South Korea and the DX division, but the trajectory of large enterprise AI deals suggests expansion is likely. As employees grow accustomed to AI-assisted workflows, companies tend to extend access to additional divisions and use cases. OpenAI, for its part, will be eager to point to measurable productivity results from the Samsung rollout as it courts other multinational customers.
The deal also raises longer-term questions about how deeply AI assistants become embedded in everyday corporate work — and whether tools like Codex, once confined to software teams, become general-purpose automation engines for entire organizations. With five million weekly Codex users and an 800 percent usage spike in a single country in just a few months, that transition appears to be accelerating faster than many expected.
---
Stay Ahead of AIGet the latest AI news, analysis, and breakthroughs — all in one place.
Read more AI news →
