OpenAI is building AI agents for everything. Will everyone use them? — SkimNews
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- ChatGPT Work launched last month at $20/month on OpenAI's lowest subscription tier, letting white-collar workers hand multistep tasks to AI agents wired into email, Slack, Notion, Figma, and other workplace apps.
- An OpenAI-backed study found 98% of OpenAI employees used Codex in June, but just 17% of organizational subscribers and under 1% of individual subscribers did — the gap the Work product is explicitly designed to close.
- Lead engineer Andrew Ambrosino told TechCrunch he gave the desktop app access to his inbox, Slack, phone, Notion, and Figma, saying: "I will take the personal hit here and there if I have to," acknowledging potential private-data leaks.
- OpenAI's joint app reaches 20 million users, versus more than 1 billion people prompting ChatGPT online, underscoring how narrow the current agentic user base remains.
- Vertical competitors like Harvey (law) and Clay (sales) are chasing the same white-collar customers with a model-agnostic approach — a risk flagged by a16z's Christian Catalini, who warned that "if the labs cannot rapidly get a hold of the key complementary assets needed to scale AI in the market, value will accrue elsewhere."
- The reporter's hands-on test surfaced real friction: permission setup for cloud drives was "confusing and circular," key settings only exist on the web app, and the agent can create Google Calendar events but not new calendars.
Why it matters: OpenAI's commercial case for agents rests on longer tasks burning more tokens per user, but with under 1% adoption among individual subscribers for agentic tools, vertical competitors like Harvey and Clay that crack non-coder workflows first could capture the revenue OpenAI needs to justify its compute spend. At $20/month, the price only pencils out if the permission headaches the reporter hit don't drive mainstream users away.
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