OpenAI has maintained a close partnership with Microsoft since its early days, but the AI company is increasingly moving into one of Microsoft’s core businesses: workplace software. With its latest ChatGPT features, OpenAI is building tools that increasingly resemble a complete office software suite.
At its Dev Day developer conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled several new ChatGPT features aimed specifically at people using AI for workplace tasks.
The most significant announcement was Space, a shared workspace built directly into ChatGPT. Space allows coworkers to collaborate with ChatGPT and with their own Dots, OpenAI’s newly introduced AI agent personas that can perform tasks on behalf of users. The workspace is designed to support a range of collaborative work.
“Your pages and files all live together in Space, like they would in a drive,” CEO Sam Altman said during Tuesday’s presentation. “But spaces feel alive.” Altman explained that users can give individual pages specific instructions, such as asking ChatGPT to check a team channel and update the page based on what it discovers.
OpenAI also introduced Pages, a companion word-processing tool that the company describes as “a new type of document, built for human and agent collaboration.” The feature appears designed to compete directly with products such as Google Docs and Microsoft Word.
According to OpenAI, Pages allows users to write and conduct research while also generating charts, creating images and visualizing information within the same document.
The company has also revealed what amounts to its answer to PowerPoint: collaborative slides. These presentations can be created simply by describing what users want through a conversation with ChatGPT. After the slides are generated, multiple people and AI agents can collaborate on them, leave comments and make edits.
Collaborative slides are not yet available, but an OpenAI representative said the feature will begin rolling out to users in the coming weeks.
As OpenAI increasingly moves into areas traditionally dominated by Microsoft, the software giant and other major technology companies are simultaneously trying to incorporate more of the capabilities associated with OpenAI.
Microsoft and Salesforce, among others, have introduced a growing range of AI-powered products over the past year as the broader software industry adapts to the rapidly changing technology landscape.
