Universities and enterprises deploy Codex and ChatGPT at scale

Higher education institutions in Australia and technology enterprises across India and the United States are moving from individual chatbot experiments to institution-wide deployments of coding agents and structured AI curricula. New case studies published by OpenAI detail how UNSW Sydney, the University of Sydney, La Trobe University, and Adelaide University are equipping students alongside operational rollouts at fitness operator Cult.fit and integration provider Merge.

Australian Universities Roll Out ChatGPT Edu and AI Degree Tracks

According to a Pureprofile survey of 1,018 Australian university students aged 18 and over conducted from Aug. 3 to Aug. 7, 2026, and published by OpenAI News, 81% of students use AI several times a week, 33% use it multiple times a day, and 28% have already built an AI agent or assistant. Furthermore, 79% want more university opportunities to apply advanced AI tools to real-world projects, 61% believe AI skills are essential to their careers, 69% view AI literacy as fundamental, 65% say it provides a global workforce advantage, 76% are interested in starting a company, and 68% believe AI makes starting a business easier.

To meet that demand, UNSW Sydney — where Master of IT student Nalin Iyer and Senior Lecturers Mariana Rodriguez-Valenzuela and May Lim are participating alongside OpenAI ANZ Education Solutions Engineer Joel Solomons — is bringing ChatGPT Edu to more than 80,000 students and staff and introducing a "Can, Can't, Must" assessment framework. The University of Sydney is rolling out ChatGPT Edu to all students in Semester 1, 2027, backed by a $1 million AI Sustainability Research and Innovation Fund. La Trobe University, led by Pro Vice-Chancellor AI and Chief AI Officer Phil Laufenberg, has equipped all 3,500 staff and plans universal access for 45,000 students and staff in the first quarter of 2027, reporting 10% month-on-month active user growth, integrating AI into 50 priority first-year subjects for Semester 1, 2027, and training more than 1,000 students in its AI Business Studio by 2028 while launching a Bachelor of AI Engineering (Honours) and an AI MBA in 2027. At La Trobe, Paramedicine Head Dr. Cameron Anderson uses ChatGPT for ECG and triage simulations, while Professor Therese Keane uses an Azure-hosted OpenAI social robot named Fletch for teacher training. Additionally, Adelaide University is using OpenAI Daybreak Blue for defensive cybersecurity work.

Cult.fit Standardizes Engineering on Codex Across 708 Fitness Centers

In India, fitness company Cult.fit — which operates 708 fitness centers across 77 cities for nearly 1 million paid members — standardized its software development lifecycle on Codex, according to OpenAI News. CTO Santhosh Kumar reported that the engineering team used spec-driven development in Codex to build and ship an in-app social feed end to end in 2 months instead of more than a year, while non-engineering teams have built more than 20 internal applications and an engineer rebuilt an internal dashboard over a weekend to save more than $100,000 in annual software costs.

With over 45% of Cult.fit members being first-time gym goers, around 20% of its gym users utilize its AI Trainer product, which now incorporates two-way voice coaching via GPT Realtime. Integrating AI agents into its Sprinklr customer support platform to evaluate class-penalty waivers using local weather and attendance signals also reduced customer support costs by more than 50%.

Merge Achieves 99.9% Tool-Call Reliability and Automates Operations

Software integration provider Merge — offering Merge Unified, Merge Agent Handler, Merge Gateway, and Merge for Workforce — reported that tool calls through Merge succeed 99.9% of the time compared to around 60% on public MCP servers, according to OpenAI News. CEO and co-founder Shensi Ding uses Codex to review code for Merge for Workforce, while employees use GPT-6 Astra for product testing, marketing, and internal workflows built by staff such as sales leader Charlie Lynch.

Using GPT-6 Astra connected to Salesforce, Gong, Google Sheets, Apollo, and Gmail, Merge built an executive dinner planning bot that cut guest-list and outreach preparation from dozens of hours to about 30 minutes per event in October 2026, helping the company expand from 8 executive dinners in Q2 to 16 in Q3 and more than 30 planned for Q4.