Apps & Consumer
OpenAI launches Space, Pages and Slides in a push into office software
OpenAI launched Space, a shared ChatGPT workspace, along with a word processor called Pages and collaborative slides, moving further into workplace software long dominated by Microsoft.
OpenAI has been a close partner of Microsoft from the start, but the AI lab is increasingly going after the company’s bread-and-butter workplace software business with new features that closely resemble an office 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 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,” CEO Sam Altman said 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 the company describes as “a new type of document, built for human and agent collaboration,” letting users “write, research, generate charts, create images, or visualize information” in it. It resembles OpenAI’s answer to Google Docs and Microsoft Word. The company has also launched collaborative slides, which can be created by talking about them within ChatGPT; once generated, multiple workers and agents can work together within them and leave comments and edit them, resembling an answer to PowerPoint.
As OpenAI edges into Microsoft’s territory, 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.
Why it matters
By building a shared workspace, a document editor and collaborative slides directly into ChatGPT, OpenAI is competing head-on with the productivity suite that anchors Microsoft’s enterprise business — a rivalry that puts pressure on a partnership both companies still rely on elsewhere.