← Glossary Term
agent-workday
A metric coined by OpenAI that converts the total runtime of its coding agents into standard eight-hour workdays, so agent effort can be compared against human labour.
The recipe is simple: add up how long your AI agents ran, divide by eight hours, and you have a number you can hold next to human working days. OpenAI reported in September 2026 that its research organisation was using 3.1 agent-workdays for every human workday.
Worth knowing before you take the figure at face value: runtime is effort, not output. An agent can spend eight hours going in circles and still register a workday. The metric tells you how much machine time is being spent, not how much was usefully spent, and it is a measure a company invented about itself.
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