Workspace Agents in ChatGPT
68 points
4 hours ago
| 10 comments
| openai.com
| HN
jryio
3 hours ago
[-]
Notion did it first and arguably better[1]. Shared agents benefit from shared context.

The hardest part is ensuring that shared context is maintained and it converges on a representation of reality and the people in the company.

[1] https://www.notion.com/help/custom-agents

reply
jeswin
1 hour ago
[-]
Notion, as any other thin-AI product out there, is now in Anthropic/OpenAI/Google's crosshairs. Unless one has a moat the size of SharePoint or Google Docs or OneDrive, it's just a feature away.
reply
baxtr
40 minutes ago
[-]
I really like Notion's UI. I wish they would focus only on that and let me access my Notion DB as .md files with Claude.
reply
nxobject
9 minutes ago
[-]
I know this is probably out of scope, but I'd love it as well if Notion could slowly accrete the features of Airtable... at least expose some form of programmatic access to tables!
reply
jorl17
39 minutes ago
[-]
Yes, please. Their MCP suuuuuuuucks
reply
gavinray
3 hours ago
[-]
At promptql, our solution to this was a wiki. You get knowledge-graph/relations for free through page links.

New knowledge additions are proposed when agents decide it would be relevant to retain, humans confirm/deny or create wiki modifications themselves.

reply
Jayakumark
3 hours ago
[-]
In demo videos, it shows Memory under Files, so i assume it holds learnings and shared context.
reply
defjosiah
1 hour ago
[-]
Yeah, the memory is cool, just a file store that you can instruct the agent to use however you see fit.
reply
mhitza
3 hours ago
[-]
This is the LLM integration approach I was pitching last year to some companies. Though in my case it was strictly tied to self-hosted inference.

Agents at the edge of business where they can work independently, asynchronously, is an approach that I don't feel was explored enough in business environments.

Sending your entire communication and documents to OpenAI would be a very bold choice.

reply
linkjuice4all
3 hours ago
[-]
Not only are businesses already doing that - they're not even cleaning up their source material so LLMs are generating garbage outputs from the old inconsistent trash that haunts Confluence, Google Drive, and all of the other dumping grounds for enterprise ephemera. Oftentimes "AI transformation" is just a slightly better search engine that regurgitates your old strategy (that didn't work the first time) and wraps it up in new sycophantic language that C-levels use to bulldoze the budgets and timelines of actual skilled front line employees.

I do believe that LLMs and AI provide actual value, but the "workspace" is usually the passive aggressive CYA battleground for employees to appear productive in-spite of leadership's blind-spots, ossified business practices, and "aligned" decision-making that doesn't actually fix a broken org. Maybe this release will be the one that finally challenges nepo-hires, not-invented here, and all of the other corpo crap that defines "enterprise" business.

reply
pixl97
2 hours ago
[-]
Cleaning up source material is not easy work in companies that have massive piles of it and don't exactly know which parts of it are wrong. Quite often these documents are poorly versioned and do work for something but not exactly what you're looking for.

With this said, you can use your incorrect AI answers to find and then purge or repair this old and/or poorly written documentation and improve the output.

reply
linkjuice4all
1 hour ago
[-]
I agree - and I've noticed that these AI transformations tend to lay bare the many issues, inconsistencies, and other problems with workspace functions and data. Unfortunately the people that are usually in charge of these projects do not have the seniority or sway to actually change the broken processes or aren't on the right team to remove cruft. Usually you have to wait until a salesperson misquotes something from an AI summary before these issues get unblocked because they actually affected revenue.
reply
neosat
1 hour ago
[-]
Tried it to automate something that was on my to do list for the day. I had blocked off a few hours for this and managed to get the agent working reasonably well (85%) of the way there in < 15 mins.

The main remaining part is the poor docx / pdf / final output but will create a skill/workflow to get around that.

Worked really well end-end!

reply
defjosiah
1 hour ago
[-]
Cool to hear, glad you enjoyed it! If you want to send any feedback on the output, feel free to send it to josiah at openai and I can take a look.
reply
neosat
1 minute ago
[-]
Great, I'll do that :)
reply
m4rkuskk
1 hour ago
[-]
OpenAI and Anthropic are killing startups and mature companies left and right. They will always have the cost advantage.
reply
Jayakumark
3 hours ago
[-]
Looks like ChatGPTs answer to claude managed agents, but using existing ChatGPT Business subscription and not API Keys. With one Caveat , it needs to be invoked from ChatGPT or Slack does not support invoking from APIs, so cannot embed it. Also google launched agent cli today to build own one and integrate with Gemini enterprise https://developers.googleblog.com/agents-cli-in-agent-platfo...
reply
dennisy
1 hour ago
[-]
I feel for the startups sweating each one of these frontier lab releases.

How many more are thinking “am I next?”

reply
gitmagic
53 minutes ago
[-]
Yeah, I’m happy I gave up, it’s just not possible to compete and the constant stress to try to keep up is not worth it.

(I built https://nelly.is as a solo founder without funding)

reply
brianjking
25 minutes ago
[-]
So this only works for Team/Enterprise accounts? No Pro?
reply
anthuswilliams
2 hours ago
[-]
Without commenting on the product itself (I haven't tried it), the marketing copy around this release commits the same sins I have seen from Anthropic and Grok and all the rest of them.

I'm so tired of seeing these companies trivializing other people's work! Nobody's job is "edit files" and "respond to messages"! People have jobs like "find and close leads" and "reconcile accounts" and "arrange student field trips" and "make sure the hospital has enough inventory", not "generate reports" and "write code".

Editing files, producing reports, even writing code is just a byproduct. This is like the idiotic "lines of code produced" metric, but now they apply it to all of society.

reply
infecto
2 hours ago
[-]
While there definitely is a healthy dose of trivializing work I think once you scratch the surface the real messaging is that we can automate or optimize these parts of a current workflow to open work for higher value tasks to folks.
reply
iugtmkbdfil834
2 hours ago
[-]
But.. to your point.. will it not be interesting once the management finds out there may be a little more to what we do?:D
reply
pzo
3 hours ago
[-]
I think I enjoyed OpenAI releases like ~1 year ago when they did video and presentation. This days with so many mini feature / releases is hard to be up to date or even figure out some use cases.
reply
TIPSIO
2 hours ago
[-]
Beautiful design and UX for the bot layouts. Kudos this is really clean
reply