OpenAI launches office collaboration features targeting Microsoft's software dominance

OpenAI has been a close partner of Microsoft from the jump, but the AI lab is increasingly going after the company’s bread and butter, workplace software, with new features that closely resemble an office software suite like Microsoft’s.

At its Dev Day developer conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, OpenAI announced several new ChatGPT features designed for office workers.

Most notably, OpenAI launched a feature called Space, a shared workspace inside ChatGPT where coworkers can collaborate with the chatbot and with their own Dots, OpenAI’s newly launched AI agent personas (that can carry out tasks on a user’s behalf), on a range of work tasks.

“Your pages and files all live together in Space, like they would in a drive,” said CEO Sam Altman during Tuesday’s presentation. “But spaces feel alive.” Altman said users can give a page specific instructions, such as checking a team channel and updating the page with what it finds.

OpenAI also announced Pages, a companion word processor that the company describes as “a new type of document, built for human and agent collaboration.” It appears to be OpenAI’s answer to Google Docs and Microsoft Word. Users can “write, research, generate charts, create images, or visualize information” in it, OpenAI says.

OpenAI has also launched its answer to PowerPoint with what it calls collaborative slides. These slides can be created by merely talking about them within ChatGPT. Once generated, multiple workers and agents can work together within them and will have the ability to leave comments and edit them.

As OpenAI edges into the territory of Microsoft, Microsoft and other software companies like Salesforce are busy trying to become more like OpenAI. Over the past year, both companies have released a slew of AI products as the software industry attempts to keep up with the shifting landscape.