Since early June, OpenAI has buffed up ChatGPT to do office work:
- Record Mode: Record and transcribe any meeting, brainstorming session or voice note. ChatGPT will pull out key points and turn them into follow-ups, plans and code.
- Enhanced Projects: Projects now have deep research, voice, improved memory, file-uploading capability and model selection.
- Advanced Voice: Voice now offers live translation and smoother interaction.
- Connectors: ChatGPT can pull data from Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft SharePoint, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Dropbox and more.
- Updated Canvas: The side-by-side editing capability can now export documents in PDF, docx or markdown formats.
Can ChatGPT eventually replace Microsoft Office, the dominant productivity software suite for office workers?
Leury Pichardo, director of marketing at Digital Ceuticals, told PYMNTS that the comparison doesn’t work because they’re not playing the same game.
“Office perfected the document-centric workflow, where humans use tools to manually create spreadsheets, presentations and reports,” Pichardo said. “AI is introducing an intelligence-centric workflow that makes many of those documents obsolete.”
A New Competitor
Pichardo said his company has stopped using Excel to write marketing performance reports.
“Instead, our AI is connected to our data, and we simply ask, ‘What were our top three growth drivers last month and why?’” he said. “It delivers the analysis directly. We get the answer without ever needing to create the report. The paradigm is shifting from using a tool to do work to prompting an intelligence to deliver the result.”
Colin Cooper, who runs his own business consultancy, told PYMNTS that OpenAI is “clearly positioning it as a real threat to productivity apps that rely on manual workflows.”
He said Read.ai, Otter.ai and Microsoft Copilot are “now in ChatGPT’s competitive crosshairs. The difference? ChatGPT isn’t just automating tasks; it’s orchestrating them, end-to-end, with context and language-level intelligence.”
AI-native workflows are the future, according to Cooper.
“We’re seeing the beginning of the ‘invisible app era’ where productivity doesn’t live in documents; it lives in dynamic, AI-mediated interactions,” he said.
Others are not quite as certain.
Nicholas Fok, managing partner of Erez Capital, told PYMNTS that ChatGPT remains far from being a true challenger to Microsoft Office. The AI chatbot “still misses the mark” in creating slide presentations compared to PowerPoint, he said.
Moreover, “hallucinations are a fundamental problem with AI, and in instances where errors can cause millions of dollars of losses or lawsuits, the adoption will be much slower,” Fok said.
Hiswai Chief Technology Officer Vaclav Vincalek agreed.
“ChatGPT is a language model, and whatever it produces only sounds good, but there is no guarantee that any output will be correct,” Vincalek told PYMNTS.
Also, given OpenAI’s “very checkered past in respect to privacy and data ownership, it would be unwise to connect any of the production systems to its models,” Vincalek said. “There is no guarantee where and how this information is used by the company.”
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