OpenAI now lets teams make custom bots that can do work on their own

Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.OpenAI is giving users of its Business, Enterprise, Edu, and Teachers plans access to cloud-based “workspace” agents available in ChatGPT that can perform business tasks. In its blog post, OpenAI gives examples of agents like one that finds product feedback on the web and sends a report in Slack and a sales agent that can draft follow-up emails in Gmail.These new agents follow increasing interest in agents across the AI landscape, especially after OpenClaw — the AI agent formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot that touts itself as the “AI that actually does things” — went viral. OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger now works for OpenAI. OpenAI is also facing increased competition from Anthropic, which offers its own Claude Cowork agent that can complete tasks for you using files from your computer, as well as a separate platform for making autonomous agents.OpenAI’s new workspace agents can be shared within organizations, “so teams can build an agent once, use it together in ChatGPT or Slack, and improve it over time.” The company says that the agents are designed to “gather context from the right systems, follow team processes, ask for approval when needed, and keep work moving across tools.”However, the agents could signal the end of OpenAI’s “GPTs,” which are custom chatbots the company announced in 2023. The company says that workspace agents are an “evolution” of GPTs and that “GPTs will remain available while teams test workspace agents with their workflows.” Sometime soon, OpenAI will also “make it easy to convert GPTs into workspace agents.” When reached for comment, OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson pointed back to the blog post but didn’t share additional information.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Jay Peters