OpenAI launches its own office suite inside ChatGPT and takes direct aim at Microsoft

At its DevDay developer conference, held Tuesday in San Francisco, OpenAI unveiled a set of workplace-oriented features for ChatGPT that, taken together, amount to a full office suite. The move is striking because OpenAI has for years been a close partner of Microsoft, yet with this announcement it begins competing directly with the productivity software business that is one of the Redmond company's main sources of revenue.

The headline addition is "Space," a shared workspace inside ChatGPT where several teammates can collaborate both with the chatbot and with their own "Dots," the AI agent personas OpenAI has just launched, which can carry out tasks on the user's behalf. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained during the presentation, "your pages and files all live together in Space, like they would in a drive," though he added that "spaces feel alive." Altman noted that users can give a page specific instructions, such as asking it to review a team channel and update the document with whatever it finds, pointing to a model of active rather than merely static documents.

Alongside Space, OpenAI introduced "Pages," a word processor the company itself describes as "a new kind of document, built for collaboration between humans and agents." In practice it is OpenAI's answer to Google Docs and Microsoft Word: it allows users to write, research, generate charts, create images or visualize information within the document itself.

The third piece of the announcement is OpenAI's answer to PowerPoint: "collaborative slides" that can be generated simply by describing them in a conversation with ChatGPT. Once created, multiple workers and agents can work on them together, leaving comments and making edits. This Slides feature, however, is not yet available: an OpenAI representative said it will roll out to users in the coming weeks.

The competitive backdrop the article sketches is one of movement in both directions: while OpenAI pushes into Microsoft's traditional territory, Microsoft and other software firms such as Salesforce have spent the past year aggressively launching their own artificial intelligence products in an attempt to look increasingly like OpenAI. In other words, productivity software makers are embedding generative AI into their tools at the same time as the provider of that very AI technology builds its own productivity tools, in a crisscrossing race not to fall behind amid the shifting landscape the sector is going through.

Taken together, the announcement suggests OpenAI is no longer content to be the artificial intelligence engine other companies integrate into their products, and instead aspires to become an end-to-end work platform in its own right, with its own documents, presentations and collaborative spaces in which its autonomous agents — the Dots — take part as just another member of the team. It remains to be seen how the relationship with Microsoft, its investor and long-standing partner, evolves as both companies compete ever more openly for the same market space.