The Agentic Review
Enterprise — JUNE 23, 2026

Samsung deploys ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to entire Korean workforce, reversing 2023 ban

The rollout, announced June 21, covers roughly 125,000 South Korean employees and Samsung's global Device eXperience division — one of OpenAI's largest enterprise deployments to date.

By Rachel Tannenbaum · Enterprise deployments desk
June 23, 2026

Samsung Electronics on June 21 turned on ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex for roughly 125,000 South Korean employees and every worker in its global Device eXperience division, the unit responsible for Galaxy smartphones, home appliances, and consumer electronics. OpenAI is calling it one of its largest enterprise rollouts to date. Samsung says the tools will be used across software development, product development, marketing, and manufacturing.

Three years ago, this was unthinkable inside Samsung. In March 2023, the company banned generative AI firm-wide after engineers pasted proprietary source code and confidential meeting records into the public ChatGPT. The reversal isn’t sentimental. It’s governance arbitrage: the new deployment runs inside Samsung’s internal controls, citing ChatGPT Enterprise’s data-protection, access-management, and security features as the precondition that didn’t exist in 2023.

“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,” said Harrison Kim, general manager of OpenAI Korea. Read for psychology rather than spin, the quote signals what OpenAI most wants the IPO market to believe: that enterprise has crossed from pilot to platform.

The plumbing was laid carefully. Samsung SDS became the first Korean firm authorized to resell and support ChatGPT Enterprise locally on December 23, 2025. Six weeks earlier, on October 31, Samsung chairman Lee Jae-yong and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman signed a letter of intent covering semiconductors, data centers, and cloud cooperation under OpenAI’s Stargate program. Samsung already supplies OpenAI with high-bandwidth memory. Now it supplies the seats too.

The usage curve helps explain the urgency. OpenAI says more than 5 million people use Codex weekly, with South Korean weekly users up nearly 800% since February 1, 2026. Knowledge workers outside engineering already account for roughly 20% of Korea’s Codex base and are growing at three times the rate of developers, with data analysis, research, and report drafting leading the non-technical workload.

The timing isn’t incidental. OpenAI confirmed its confidential S-1 on June 8, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading an offering analysts value between $852 billion and $1 trillion. Enterprise revenue now exceeds 40% of OpenAI’s roughly $2 billion in monthly revenue. A 125,000-seat conversion from a 2023 banner-case skeptic is the kind of datapoint roadshows are built around.

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