Nexalytics Tech
Samsung Electronics is giving employees access to ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, as part of a wider push to use generative AI across engineering, marketing, product, and manufacturing workflows. OpenAI announced the deployment on June 21, 2026, describing it as "one of OpenAI's largest enterprise deployments to date" — and one of the most significant outside the United States.
One of OpenAI's Largest Enterprise Deployments
Under the agreement, ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex become available to every Samsung Electronics employee in South Korea, plus every employee worldwide in the company's Device eXperience (DX) division — the unit responsible for smartphones, TVs, and home appliances. Samsung Electronics employed just over 259,000 people across 76 countries as of the end of 2025, according to the company's own newsroom figures, with roughly half the workforce based in Korea per its most recent sustainability disclosures; the DX division alone touches hundreds of millions of end products sold each year, meaning tools being adopted internally today are likely to shape what ships in consumer hardware going forward.
OpenAI frames the intended use broadly rather than as a narrow coding tool: Samsung plans to use ChatGPT and Codex "for technical and non-technical work, across a broad range of functions, including software development, marketing, product development, and manufacturing," according to the announcement. Harrison Kim, OpenAI's General Manager for Korea, said: "This historic deployment for OpenAI is particularly significant because Samsung Electronics, a global leader in technology and manufacturing, is embracing AI not as a tool limited to certain teams or functions, but as a core platform for improving how employees around the world work and innovate. OpenAI will work closely with Samsung Electronics to help its employees level up with ChatGPT and Codex to move from ideas to execution faster, solve complex problems, and create new products and services."
OpenAI also disclosed adoption figures that illustrate how quickly this has moved: more than 5 million people now use Codex every week worldwide across technical and non-technical work, and weekly active Codex users in Korea specifically have grown nearly 800% since February 1, 2026 — a jump that predates this formal company-wide rollout and suggests Samsung employees, along with other Korean companies, were already adopting the tool ahead of the announcement.
From Banning ChatGPT to Betting On It
The turnaround is notable given Samsung's own history with the technology. In May 2023, Samsung banned employee use of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools after Bloomberg reported that engineers had uploaded sensitive internal material to the chatbot on at least three occasions within a 20-day span — including one case in which an engineer pasted in proprietary source code while trying to fix a bug. Samsung's concern, common among large companies at the time, was that data entered into public AI tools could be stored on third-party servers with no straightforward way to retrieve or delete it.
Three years later, the company is doing the opposite: deploying the same category of tool company-wide, under an enterprise contract that includes the data protection, access management, and security controls OpenAI markets specifically to corporate customers. The shift mirrors a broader pattern across large employers — treat consumer AI tools as an uncontrolled risk first, then adopt a governed enterprise version once one exists — and Samsung's scale makes this one of the most visible examples of that pattern completing.
What It Means for Enterprise AI
The relationship between the two companies runs in both directions. Samsung Electronics is separately supplying OpenAI with advanced memory semiconductors for next-generation AI infrastructure, according to OpenAI's announcement, meaning Samsung is simultaneously a major customer of OpenAI's enterprise software and a supplier into the physical infrastructure OpenAI's models run on.
The deal also sits inside a broader wave of OpenAI adoption in South Korea that the company's own announcement cites as supporting evidence: Seoul National University recently began providing ChatGPT Edu access to all 47,000 members of its community as part of a push to become an "AI-native campus," and OpenAI has partnered with Kakao to let users ask ChatGPT questions directly inside KakaoTalk group chats, one of the country's most widely used messaging platforms. OpenAI's announcement also names other Korean companies already using ChatGPT Enterprise, its APIs, or Codex, including LG Electronics, LG Uplus, LG CNS, Samsung SDS, Krafton, Toss, and MUSINSA — suggesting Samsung's rollout, while unusually large, is part of a broader pattern of Korean corporate AI adoption rather than an isolated deal.
For enterprise decision-makers elsewhere, the scope is the headline: this is not a limited proof-of-concept confined to a handful of developer teams. Putting Codex in front of Samsung's engineering workforce at scale, alongside ChatGPT for marketing, manufacturing, and other non-technical functions, is a direct bet that AI-assisted work can compress product cycles and cut overhead across one of the largest consumer electronics businesses in the world. It's the kind of deployment that pressures competitors to either match the pace or fall behind on how quickly they can ship software and iterate on products.
💡 The Nexalytics Take
Samsung's ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex rollout is less about a flashy product than about where enterprise AI is actually landing: inside a company that ships hundreds of millions of phones, TVs, and appliances a year, and that banned ChatGPT outright just three years ago after a source-code leak. OpenAI calls it one of its largest enterprise deployments ever, covering all of Samsung's Korean workforce and its global device division, with Codex adoption in Korea already up nearly 800% since February. For Nexalytics readers, the real signal isn't the specific products — it's the reversal: a company that once treated ChatGPT as a security risk now treats not using it as the bigger one.
Source: OpenAI — Samsung Electronics brings ChatGPT and Codex to employees
