OpenAI shifts toward business use

OpenAI is steering harder toward workplace software, pairing a new business-focused model plan with a bigger Codex app for Mac. (abcnews.com) (openai.com) Chief financial officer Sarah Friar told The Associated Press on April 15 that OpenAI will soon release a model for “high-value professional work.” She said the company is shifting toward business-oriented products as it looks for a path to profitability. (abcnews.com) A day later, on April 16, OpenAI said its updated Codex app for macOS and Windows can see the screen, click, type, use an in-app browser, generate images, and run multiple agents in parallel. OpenAI said more than 3 million developers already use Codex each week. (openai.com) (macrumors.com) The business logic is simple: OpenAI says ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly users, and Friar said about 95% of them do not pay. Those free users help build habits, but they also consume expensive computing power. (abcnews.com) OpenAI is making that pivot while Anthropic presses its advantage with corporate buyers. Friar said OpenAI’s coming model, internally codenamed Spud, is meant to answer Anthropic’s push into workplace assistants. (abcnews.com) The rivalry is now tied to investor pressure as well as product design. Reuters reported on April 14 that OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation was drawing scrutiny from some backers after the company redrew its roadmap twice in six months while trying to fend off Google and Anthropic. (usnews.com) OpenAI has also been cutting consumer projects. Friar told AP the company had moved away from some efforts, and OpenAI’s help center says the Sora web app will shut down on April 26, 2026, with the Sora application programming interface set to end on September 24, 2026. (abcnews.com) (help.openai.com) Codex shows what OpenAI wants that shift to look like in practice. Instead of only answering prompts in a chat box, the software now reaches into desktop apps, remote developer boxes over Secure Shell, GitHub review flows, PDFs, spreadsheets, slides, and docs from one workspace. (openai.com) OpenAI also said Codex now supports more than 90 additional plugins, including Atlassian Rovo, CircleCI, GitLab Issues, Microsoft Suite, Neon by Databricks, Render, and Superpowers. The company said the app can preserve context across threads and schedule future work that resumes automatically over days or weeks. (openai.com) That leaves OpenAI trying to turn mass consumer reach into paid office work. The next test is whether the promised professional model and the expanded Codex tools can persuade companies to hand more of their daily workflows to OpenAI. (abcnews.com) (openai.com)