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OpenAI is building new features within ChatGPT that would make it a direct competitor with workplace productivity suites like Google Workplace and Microsoft Office 365, The Information reported Tuesday. ZDNET has reached out to OpenAI for comment.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
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The new features reportedly include collaborative document editing capabilities, like those offered by Google Docs, along with meeting transcription and a team chat function. If released, they would mark OpenAI’s latest initiative to transform ChatGPT into a general-purpose AI assistant.
While OpenAI has yet to officially announce any plans to build its own workplace productivity suite, such an effort would ratchet up its competition with Google, whose web search traffic has already taken a hit from the rise of generative AI-powered alternatives like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
A ChatGPT productivity suite would also directly compete with similar software from Microsoft, further complicating what’s already become a messy relationship. The two companies have been strategic partners since 2019, with Microsoft providing OpenAI with much of the financial backing it has needed to train its cutting-edge models. Microsoft, in turn, got the rights to integrate OpenAI’s technology into its core products, including its Bing search engine, which was later rebranded to Microsoft Copilot.
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Microsoft currently owns a roughly 49% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm, but the two companies are now reportedly working on restructuring the terms of their deal. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been distancing itself from its dependency on Microsoft’s cloud service, most recently by entering into an unlikely strategic partnership with Google, one of its biggest competitors in the ongoing AI race.
The sudden uptick in demand for generative AI tools in recent years has prompted both Google and Microsoft to fuse the technology into their workplace productivity suites (Google Workplace and Microsoft Office 365, respectively). But OpenAI could have a technical advantage in this regard, as its competitor offering to these platforms would be built from the ground up around its flagship chatbot.
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Since the viral success of ChatGPT in late 2022, OpenAI has sought to maintain its momentum by continually expanding the chatbot’s capabilities and developing new tools to get it into the hands of as many people as possible. Within the past two weeks alone, the company has released an audio recording and transcription tool for some paid ChatGPT users and integrated its image-generating feature into WhatsApp.
The company is also collaborating with iPhone designer Jony Ive’s company, io, to build a wearable AI device, and it’s rumored to be working on its own social media platform.
