OpenAI Workspace Agents

OpenAI has turned ChatGPT into a workplace automation tool with “workspace agents” that can keep working across apps after a user logs off. (openai.com) OpenAI announced the feature on April 22, 2026, and said the agents are powered by Codex, its tool-using system for software and knowledge work. The company said teams can build shared agents inside ChatGPT and use them in Slack as well as through connected enterprise tools. (openai.com) On OpenAI’s business page, the company lists Slack, Google Drive, and Microsoft SharePoint among the services these agents can work across, with governance and admin controls for organizations. VentureBeat reported that Salesforce is also part of the rollout OpenAI pitched to enterprise customers. (openai.com, venturebeat.com) The basic idea is that a company can create one agent for a repeated job — like preparing reports, responding to messages, or writing code — and let coworkers reuse it instead of prompting from scratch each time. OpenAI said the agents run in the cloud and can handle long-running workflows within an organization’s permissions. (openai.com) That marks a shift from the custom GPTs OpenAI introduced in late 2023, which were mainly chat-based assistants configured with instructions and files. OpenAI now describes workspace agents as “an evolution of GPTs” built for shared, ongoing work across teams and tools. (openai.com) The release also extends OpenAI’s earlier Codex push into business software. In October 2025, OpenAI made Codex generally available and added a Slack integration that let users assign tasks from a channel or thread. (openai.com, developers.openai.com) OpenAI’s developer documentation says Codex plugins can connect to apps such as GitHub, Slack, and Google Drive, and can also pull in outside tools through Model Context Protocol servers. That gives the system a way to read from work systems and take actions in them, not just answer questions about them. (developers.openai.com) The company is selling the feature as a managed enterprise product, not a consumer chatbot add-on. OpenAI said workspace agents are available in ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Edu, and Teachers plans, with admins able to control who can create agents, share them, and decide whether Slack posts include full answers or only task links. (openai.com, developers.openai.com) OpenAI has been testing the model internally before this launch. In February 2026, the company described an in-house data agent that employees could use in Slack, in the Codex command line tool, and inside OpenAI’s internal ChatGPT app, built around company permissions and workflows. (openai.com) The immediate question is whether companies trust these agents with enough access to make them useful without giving them too much room to act on their own. OpenAI’s answer, at launch, is to wrap the agents in cloud execution, app-by-app connections, and admin controls — and to make them part of the same ChatGPT interface many office workers already use. (openai.com, openai.com)