July 9: OpenAI on Thursday announced ChatGPT Work, an agent for popular chatbots designed to perform tasks across a variety of applications and files, marking the startup’s latest effort into workplace automation.
Powered by OpenAI’s advanced AI model GPT-5.6, ChatGPT Work can gather context from apps, files, and workflows to create finished documents, spreadsheets, presentations, reports, and websites, the company said.
The announcement reflects the growing competition to build and sell professional AI tools, as technology companies seek to capitalize on the growing demand for autonomous agents that can complete complex tasks with minimal human intervention.
Prior to this release, OpenAI’s agent products included Operator and Deep Research, which were later integrated into ChatGPT Agent for individual users and Workspace Agents for enterprise workflow automation.
ChatGPT Work comes a few months after OpenAI rival Anthropic ramped up its enterprise efforts with Claude Cowork, an agent that can plan and execute multi-step tasks autonomously.
Earlier this year, Anthropic released a plugin for Claude Cowork agents to automate legal, sales, marketing, and data analysis tasks. The move triggered a sharp selloff in software and professional services stocks in the U.S. and Europe on concerns about widespread AI disruption to the data analytics industry.
Shortly after Anthropic, OpenAI backer Microsoft also announced Copilot Cowork to build agent-based AI services.
As it prepares for its IPO, OpenAI also announced a new ChatGPT desktop application and a hosted website feature that allows users to build and share websites directly through ChatGPT Work.
ChatGPT Work launches Thursday on web and mobile for Pro, Enterprise, and Edu users and will expand to Plus and Business users over the next few days.
