New Zealanders are embracing ChatGPT at a rapid pace, with new data from OpenAI showing a small group of businesses pulling ahead dramatically — generating 14 times more output per worker than everyone else.
OpenAI says New Zealanders are now sending almost 10 million messages to ChatGPT each day.
A survey commissioned by the company found 40% of respondents use ChatGPT every day, while 45% said it saved them at least four hours each week.
New Zealand also ranked within the top 40 markets globally for ChatGPT use per capita.
OpenAI's head of communications for New Zealand and Australia, Chloe Browne, said use of the platform was continuing to grow.
A survey commissioned by the company found 40% of respondents use ChatGPT every day, while 45% said it saved them at least four hours each week. (Source: Breakfast)
"Weekly active users in New Zealand have grown by more than 20% over the past year," she said.
A growing share of that use was taking place at work.
Kiwi workers turning to AI at pace
More than a third of ChatGPT messages sent in New Zealand were work related, around six percentage points higher than the global average.
Some businesses were already moving well beyond using AI simply to answer questions or generate text.
OpenAI's data showed almost half of enterprise output in New Zealand now came from its more "agentic" products.
Those tools could carry out more complex, multi-step pieces of work, including analysing data, conducting research, preparing presentations and helping businesses develop or test ideas.
Gawesha Weeratunga, from OpenAI's Economic Research team, told BNZ Business Breakfast that New Zealand businesses stood out for their uptake of those tools.
"What we're seeing is that New Zealand businesses are really over-indexing on agentic adoption," he said.
While New Zealand sits within the top 40 markets for overall ChatGPT use per capita, Weeratunga said it ranks even higher when it comes to the use of AI agents.
But that uptake was far from even.
Businesses pulling ahead with AI
OpenAI's data showed the top 10% of New Zealand businesses using its products generated 14 times as many output tokens per worker as the typical business.
"What we're seeing though is that there is quite a big gap in terms of the businesses here in New Zealand who are embracing AI and using it for sort of agentic capabilities like taking on multi-step tasks," Weeratunga said.
"And that's a gap that's actually widening over time."
He said simply giving employees access to AI tools was not enough.
Businesses getting more out of the technology were also investing in training and giving staff opportunities to experiment with how AI could fit into their work.
OpenAI worked with New Zealand companies including Air New Zealand, One NZ and Genesis Energy.
Access alone isn’t enough
Weeratunga said initiatives such as internal AI champions and hackathons were among the ways companies were encouraging wider use.
"It's really important, I think, for this to be modelled from the top down, so for executives and leaders in companies to give their teams the time, the space to experiment with AI tools," he said.
For companies that were slower to adopt the technology, he said there was a risk competitors could move ahead.
"I think there is a risk of getting left behind."
However, there was still a bigger question over how much that use was improving companies' bottom lines.
"The revenue question is something that we're also tracking... The question for large enterprises is still open and we're tracking that very closely."
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