It’s OpenAI’s fourth annual DevDay, its equivalent to Apple’s WWDC, but for developers building with AI. While last year focused on major releases like apps inside ChatGPT and an agent builder, this year’s announcements seem to be fleshing out a long-held suspicion that OpenAI is coming for Google Workspace.
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Here’s what’s new for Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans.
Space, Pages, and slides
ChatGPT Space is “a new home for your team to collaborate with AI to get work done,” OpenAI said in a blog. Users can work with ChatGPT, other teammates, and a new agentic feature called Dots. Pro, Business, and Enterprise users can start trying ChatGPT Space today on the desktop app and the web.
OpenAI said mobile access is on the way.
Also: How to use ChatGPT Work – and my top 10 tips for getting started with agentic AI
Pages and collaborative slides, both new today, are “built for human and agent collaboration,” OpenAI said. Each lets users create documents and presentations with ChatGPT’s generative abilities, including on-page research, graphics, and images.
Users can build interactive slides with help from coworkers and ChatGPT, designing conversationally or importing their own templates. As in Google Slides, multiple users (and agents) can edit slides simultaneously; users can present directly from ChatGPT or export their slides to PowerPoint or Google, allegedly without disrupting formatting. Pages are available now, while the slides feature is coming in the next few weeks.
These two releases are very similar to Anthropic’s recent launch of Claude Docs, part of its Claude Cowork consolidation, which also absorbed Claude Design and Slides. For both ChatGPT and Claude, document and slide creation are now features inside a central agentic home base rather than disparate tools.
During a demo of Pages, which looks like a Notion landing page, an OpenAI representative tagged her Dot (an OpenClaw-esque agent) directly in comments in the workspace, assigned it feedback from a coworker, and otherwise iterated on the project, all in one place.
Also: I let ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork loose on my files – only one made me nervous
During the keynote, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talked about Space, Pages, presentation slides, and Dots as pieces of a new system, though he did not frame it as a Workspace competitor.
Private Intelligence
One of the primary impediments to businesses adopting AI is data security. Enterprise clients are understandably concerned that while they may have a use case for AI, the risk of exposing sensitive data to agents or the companies behind frontier LLMs is too great.
At DevDay, OpenAI announced Private Intelligence, a data access approval layer to give enterprise customers “greater confidence that their data is protected,” OpenAI said.
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“Zero Data Retention with Private Safety Processing enables automated safety reviews without giving OpenAI personnel access to the underlying content,” the company explained. It added that “our preview of Private Inference, coming this fall, combines confidential computing with strict, verifiable controls,” but didn’t offer more detail on Intelligence versus Inference yet.
The name Private Intelligence is immediately reminiscent of Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, giving the impression that businesses can access the full power of OpenAI’s frontier models without sacrificing security. In consumer AI, that hasn’t been the case: Getting better results from an assistant tends to rely on giving up more of your information to an AI model, as with Gemini’s Personal Intelligence.
Why now?
Last year, OpenAI was supposedly exploring features that would turn ChatGPT into more of a productivity suite, including a collaborative document editing tool similar to Google Docs. But since then, OpenAI has followed an ostensibly meandering path, launching and then sunsetting its consumer video app Sora while Anthropic dominated in enterprise revenue.
That said, OpenAI did take the Anthropic hint with a few key releases over the last six months. ChatGPT Work, launched in July as an answer to Claude Cowork, splices out non-coding-related tasks to give other types of workers an agentic boost.
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Anthropic absorbed Cowork back into Claude to create a more seamless, one-stop shop for users’ agentic needs, but the tool’s initial purpose made sense for workplace use cases. OpenAI’s new features appear to follow the same thinking, though the company is hesitant to fully claim any productivity suite plans.
“Space is built for people and AI to work on the same content together,” an OpenAI representative told ZDNET via email. “Pages are a format native to ChatGPT that AI can read and create, and that teammates can edit together in real time. Today, people develop ideas in ChatGPT, move the work elsewhere to share it, then bring feedback back to ChatGPT. Space brings that process together so people can create, share, and keep working with their team and ChatGPT in one place.”
In that sense, the move is similar to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork consolidation. By making the new Docs available inside Claude alongside Claude Design and Slides, Anthropic turned its chatbot into a doorway to a workplace suite where multiple teammates (human and agent) collaborate on projects. ChatGPT Space seems to do the same.
