OpenAI introduced a new paradigm and product today that is likely to have huge implications for enterprises seeking to adopt and control fleets of AI agent workers.Called “Workspace Agents,” OpenAI’s new offering essentially allows users on its ChatGPT Business ($20 per user per month) and variably priced Enterprise, Edu and Teachers subscription plans to design or select from pre-existing agent templates that can take on work tasks across third-party apps and data sources including Slack, Google Drive, Microsoft apps, Salesforce, Notion, Atlassian Rovo, and other popular enterprise applications.Put simply: these agents can be created and accessed from ChatGPT, but users can also add them to third-party apps like Slack, communicate with them across disparate channels, ask them to use information from the channel they’re in and other third-party tools and apps, and the agents will go off and do work like drafting emails to the entire team, selected members, or pull data and make presentations.Human users can trust that the agent will manage all this complexity and complete the task as requested, even if the user who requested it leaves.It’s the end of “babysitting” agents and the start of letting them go off and get shit done for your business — according to your defined business processes and permissions, of course. The product experience appears centered on the Agents tab in the ChatGPT sidebar, where teams can discover and manage shared agents. This functions as a kind of team directory: a place where agents built by coworkers can be reused across a workspace. The broader idea is that AI becomes less of an individual productivity trick and more of a shared organizational r …
