OpenAI Pushes Deeper Into Business Software With New Agent

ChatGPT maker has launched a new AI-powered agent designed to help professionals create spreadsheets, draft PowerPoint presentations, and complete routine office tasks in minutes

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  • The ChatGPT agent, announced Thursday, combines web browsing, data analysis, and document creation into one tool that can click, scroll, and type like a human while synthesizing large amounts of online information.

    Available immediately for Pro, Plus, and Team subscribers, with Enterprise and Education users to follow later this summer, the San Francisco company pitched it as an assistant that can handle time-consuming “night work” like financial analysis, research briefs, and competitive slide decks.

    “You can ask it to analyze competitors, build a presentation, or summarize your calendar and the latest news about your clients,” said Neel Ajjarapu, product manager for the ChatGPT agent.

    OpenAI said the agent is particularly effective at entry-level financial analysis and other tasks that might otherwise take hours.

    The release comes as tech firms rush to bring autonomous AI agents to the workplace, promising to boost productivity and cut costs by performing repetitive human tasks.

    Salesforce, Workday, and others already offer AI bots that summarize reports and reach out to prospects, though many are still limited by their need to connect with other apps and services.

    For OpenAI, the agent also marks a more aggressive step into areas long dominated by Microsoft, its major investor and partner.

    Microsoft’s own Copilot agent already helps users create and edit PowerPoints and Excel files. OpenAI said its agent does not support Google’s Slides and Sheets and denied it was designed to compete directly with Microsoft, with chief product officer Kevin Weil calling it “an important step forward in making ChatGPT not just answer questions but actually get things done.”

    By automating tasks such as drafting presentations and building detailed spreadsheets, work that once took hours or days and can now be done in 30 minutes, the agent could further strain the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft.

    The ChatGPT agent builds on OpenAI’s earlier Operator and deep research bots by combining both capabilities—navigating the web and digesting larger volumes of information. The company said future enhancements could enable even more advanced business workflows.

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