AI agents are creating more work, not less — and OpenAI’s own numbers back it up
The New Stack 1 month ago 47 ● 5 sources
OpenAI reported that its automated “research intern” agents have increased the amount of agent work used by its research teams, with coding-agent usage rising through 2026. By mid-August, agents were logging 3.1 agent-workdays for every human workday, while median researchers spent more than $600 per day on inference and the 90th percentile spent over $7,000. The result is more parallel execution that shifts more supervision and compute to humans and other models, with outages and security limits forcing workload moves and restrictions rather than reducing overall work.