Are Enterprises Actually Using Reasoning Models?

The excitement around reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1 got me thinking: How much are businesses actually using them? 

The answer might be: not as much as you’d think.

When I ask business executives at startups and large firms about their companies’ usage of reasoning models to power their products, a common refrain I’ve heard is that these models, which spend extra time to process (or “think”) about the problem at hand, simply are too slow or costly, especially with customers who expect an answer right away.

For instance, customers of Braintrust, which helps companies like Instacart evaluate artificial intelligence models, only use reasoning models less than 15% of time.