The addition of Ona’s technology, which enables agents to access the tools, systems and context they need to complete work over time, will allow Codex users to delegate work that may take hours or days to the coding agent without being tied to a single device or active session, OpenAI said in a Thursday (June 11) press release.
“Ona will help us make Codex easier to deploy securely across production workflows for customers operating at the highest standards of trust and scale,” OpenAI Core Products Lead Thibault Sottiaux said in the release.
The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, according to the release.
Ona Co-founder and CEO Johannes Landgraf said Thursday blog post that the planned acquisition will give Ona a scale of research and distribution that it could not achieve alone. He added that together, the companies will make AI accessible, abundant and safe.
“Together, we can help enterprises move AI work beyond individual coding sessions tied to a single laptop, toward cloud-based workflows across software and knowledge work, accessible from any laptop, phone or tablet,” Landgraf said. “In these workflows, agents take on real work and carry it forward inside secure cloud environments with the right access, context, tools and state, under the enterprise’s control.”
OpenAI said in its press release that the number of people using Codex has increased by 400% since the beginning of the year and surpassed 5 million.
PYMNTS reported June 2 that the company is expanding the uses of Codex for fields beyond software engineering by rolling out new plugins for the agent that are designed for jobs in public equity investment, banking and sales, with plans to add features related to legal, marketing strategy and corporate finance.
“Codex started as a tool for software development, but it’s increasingly useful for more kinds of work,” OpenAI said at the time in a press release. “Non-developers, including analysts, marketers, operators, designers, researchers, investors and bankers, make up about 20% of overall Codex users and are growing more than three times as fast as developers.”
OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC in January that she expects the share of OpenAI’s business that is made up of enterprise customers to increase from 40% to 50% by the end of the year.
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