VentureBeatApr 22, 11:53 PM
OpenAI unveils Workspace Agents, a successor to custom GPTs for enterprises that can plug directly into Slack, Salesforce and more
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 resource.
In this sense, OpenAI is targeting one of office work’s oldest pain points: the handoff between people, systems, and steps in a process.
OpenAI says workspace agents will be free for the next two weeks, until May 6, 2026, after which credit-based pricing will begin. The company also says more capabilities are on the way, including new triggers to start work automatically, better dashboards, more ways for agents to take action across business tools, and support for workspace agents in its AI code generation app, Codex.
For more information on how to get started building and using them, OpenAI recommends heading over to its online academy page on them here and its help desk documentation here.
The Codex backbone
The most significant shift in this announcement is the move away from purely session-based interaction. Workspace agents are powered by Codex — the cloud-based, partially open-source AI coding harness that OpenAI has been aggressively expanding in 2026 — which gives them access to a workspace for files, code, tools, and memory.
OpenAI says the agents can do far more than answer a prompt. They can write or run code, use connected apps, remember what they have learned, and continue work across multiple steps.
That description lines up closely with the capa