OpenAI adds workspace agents

OpenAI on April 22 began rolling out workspace agents, a new ChatGPT feature that lets companies build shared bots for recurring work inside managed team accounts. (openai.com) OpenAI said the agents are “Codex-powered,” run in the cloud, and can keep working after a person closes the chat window. The company said teams can use them for reports, code, message responses, and other multi-step tasks. (openai.com) The launch is aimed at ChatGPT Business and Enterprise customers, with OpenAI’s release notes saying the rollout will happen gradually over the next few weeks. OpenAI’s help center said the feature is also covered for Edu and Teachers plans in its management documentation. (help.openai.com, help.openai.com) These agents are built for repeatable workflows, not one-off prompts. OpenAI’s academy materials describe them as a way to stop re-explaining the same steps and copying information between tools each time a task comes up. (openai.com) That pushes ChatGPT further from a chat box toward a shared work layer for teams. OpenAI said agents can be created once, shared across an organization, and improved over time instead of living in one employee’s private chat history. (openai.com) OpenAI said workspace agents can connect to tools and apps including Google Drive, Google Calendar, Slack, and SharePoint. Release notes also say teams can add files, skills, and custom Model Context Protocol servers, then schedule agents to run recurring jobs in ChatGPT. (help.openai.com, help.openai.com) Slack is a central part of the rollout. OpenAI’s Slack documentation says companies can deploy a workspace agent into Slack channels, where it can answer questions, carry out tasks through connected systems, and send files back into Slack. (help.openai.com) The controls are aimed at administrators as much as end users. OpenAI said workspace owners and admins can decide who can build agents, publish them, or use Slack integrations, and role-based access controls can limit access by user group. (help.openai.com, help.openai.com) OpenAI also said the feature is off by default at launch and is not available at launch for ChatGPT Enterprise workspaces with Enterprise Key Management, or EKM. That caveat shows the company is still fitting autonomous agents into the stricter security settings large customers use. (help.openai.com) The release also lands one week after OpenAI updated its Agents software development kit with sandbox support for developers building agents through the application programming interface. Together, the two launches show OpenAI selling agents both as a coding platform and as a managed workplace product inside ChatGPT. (the-decoder.com, openai.com)