Start here: what problem do they solve?

Most AI tools today require you to bring the information to them. You copy text from an email, paste it into ChatGPT, get a response, copy that back into your document. Then you do it again for the next email. And again for the spreadsheet. This back-and-forth is fine for occasional use, but it adds up quickly across a working day.

Workspace Agents are OpenAI's answer to this friction. Instead of you constantly moving information around, an agent connects directly to your tools — Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Salesforce, Notion — and handles multi-step tasks by pulling information from those places automatically. You describe what you want, and the agent works across your tools to produce the result.

What a Workspace Agent actually is

A Workspace Agent is a shared, persistent AI assistant that your team sets up once. Unlike a regular ChatGPT conversation (which disappears when you close it), a Workspace Agent remembers its instructions, its connected tools, and can keep working in the background — even when you're in a meeting or have closed your browser.

They're the replacement for Custom GPTs, which OpenAI is phasing out for business subscribers. If your company built Custom GPTs, those will need to be rebuilt as Workspace Agents at some point.

The key difference between a Workspace Agent and a regular ChatGPT chat is reach. A regular chat only knows what you paste into it. A Workspace Agent can access your Slack messages, your Google Drive files, your Salesforce records, and your Microsoft 365 documents — all without you doing the copying and pasting.

Who has access right now

Workspace Agents are available to:

ChatGPT Business — $20 per user per month, designed for teams.

ChatGPT Enterprise — Large organisation plans with additional security controls.

ChatGPT Edu and Teachers — Education accounts.

They are not available on personal ChatGPT Plus ($20/month for individuals) or free accounts. This is a team feature.

Important: they are free to use until 6 May 2026. After that date, a credit-based pricing system begins. If your organisation is on a qualifying plan, you can test them at no extra cost before that date.

What would a desk worker actually use one for?

The most useful early use cases are tasks that currently require you to gather information from multiple places before you can write or decide anything. Here are three that are working well right now.

Weekly status reports

You normally spend 30–45 minutes each Friday pulling updates from Slack, checking what moved in your project tracker, and writing a report. An agent can do the gathering for you and produce a draft. You review and send.

Client or stakeholder catch-up before a meeting

Before a call, you want to know the last three emails exchanged, any relevant notes in Drive, and what's open in Salesforce. An agent can pull all of this into a one-page summary in about 30 seconds.

Follow-up email drafts from CRM data

If you're in sales, account management, or customer service, you can ask an agent to scan your Salesforce or HubSpot activity for contacts who haven't heard from you in more than a week and draft personalised follow-up emails for each one.

I need a weekly status report for my manager. Pull any updates posted to [Slack channel name] this week. Check [Google Drive folder name] for any files added or updated since Monday. Draft a summary using this structure: Project: [name] This week's progress: [2-4 bullet points] Next week's plan: [2-4 bullet points] Blockers or risks: [bullet points, or write "None" if none] Tone: professional, direct, under 200 words total.

How to access them

If you're on a qualifying plan, go to chatgpt.com and look for an "Agents" section in the left sidebar. OpenAI is rolling this out progressively, so it may appear as a banner or notification. You can also go directly to chatgpt.com/workspace-agents to check availability on your account.

Setting one up involves writing a plain-English instruction (what the agent should do, what tools it can use, what the output should look like) and then connecting the relevant apps through OpenAI's integration settings. Your IT administrator may need to authorise the app connections.

💡 This week's action

Check whether Workspace Agents appear in your ChatGPT sidebar. If they do, write a one-paragraph description of your most repetitive multi-step task — something that requires you to gather information from more than one place before you can write or decide anything. That paragraph is the starting point for your first agent instruction. If you're not on a business plan, note this feature for your next IT or budget conversation — it's worth knowing about.

What hasn't changed

For most individual users, the day-to-day ChatGPT experience is unchanged. Regular chats, memory (where enabled), and custom instructions all work the same way. Workspace Agents are an addition for teams, not a replacement for the tools you already use.

If you're using ChatGPT for individual writing, summarising, or research tasks, keep doing exactly what's working. Workspace Agents are useful when the bottleneck is gathering and moving information across multiple tools — not when you're writing something from scratch.