The news: OpenAI’s business user base surged 50% since February, reaching 3 million paying enterprise customers. To deepen its footprint in the space, the company released workplace features aimed squarely at Microsoft and Google, per VentureBeat.

New options let employees pull and interact with cloud data from SharePoint, Dropbox, Google Drive, and more—directly in ChatGPT. Also added: Record Mode for transcribing meetings and upgrades to Codex and Deep Research.

The intended result is more seamless integration of OpenAI’s tools across the most-used business and productivity cloud applications.

Why it’s worth watching: OpenAI’s focus on enterprise solutions places it squarely in competition with established platforms and business productivity tools at a time when 81% of US workers say generative AI (genAI) can make them more efficient and productive, per PYMNTS.

OpenAI shifting from partner to competitor to Microsoft in a segment the latter has long dominated underscores the AI startup’s dramatic rise in enterprise use.

“Any company that has gone from being a research lab to one of the most successful product companies of this age—obviously things have to change for them and for us and in the context of the partnership,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Bloomberg.

OpenAI is also competing with Notion, Perplexity, and Anthropic, which are all evolving beyond search and chatbots to attract business users. 

OpenAI’s objective: Its goal is to add a productivity layer built directly into ChatGPT—integrating with existing work apps and redefining how teams operate. 

• Integrations. “Connectors” blur app boundaries by making ChatGPT the front door to files, data, and insights.
• Transcription. OpenAI now competes with Zoom, ClickUp, and Notion in AI-powered transcription and meeting summaries, potentially replacing tools like Otter or Fireflies with Record Mode.
• Deep dives. Deep Research is now more easily accessible for multi-source querying, edging into analyst and knowledge-management roles and countering recent moves by Microsoft.

Security in question: OpenAI offers enterprise-grade security and vows not to train on customer data. But its breakneck growth and AI complexity could still give some IT leaders pause.

Our take: Expect ChatGPT to continue evolving from a standalone AI app to a productivity platform. Business leaders should evaluate OpenAI’s new business suite not just as a productivity upgrade, but as a strategic shift toward AI-driven business platforms.