OpenAI is surfacing company knowledge by connecting ChatGPT to enterprise data, turning it from a general assistant into a custom analyst.
For business leaders, generative AI’s potential has always been limited by its lack of access to internal data. Even the best AI isn’t helpful if it can’t access the info needed to do a job. OpenAI points out that the info you need is often in your internal tools, but that knowledge is scattered across documents, files, messages, emails, tickets, and project trackers.
This scattering is more than just annoying; it hurts efficiency and decisionmaking. The main problem is that these tools don’t always connect, and the best answer is often spread across all of them.
This puts OpenAI up against the AI strategies of big enterprise platforms like Microsoft’s Copilot in Azure and Office 365, Google’s Vertex AI, Salesforce’s Agentforce, and AWS Bedrock. Everyone is racing to connect models to secure company data.
OpenAI uses third-party data for ChatGPT enterprise tasks
ChatGPT will connect to apps like Slack, SharePoint, Google Drive, and GitHub. OpenAI says it’s powered by a version of GPT-5, trained to check many sources for better answers. For checking and validation, every answer shows where the info came from.
This changes what you can do from simple writing to complex analysis. For example, a manager prepping for a client call could ask for a briefing. The model could then use recent Slack messages, email details, call notes from Google Docs, and support tickets from Intercom to make a summary.
This power can also handle confusion. If you ask, “What are the company goals for next year?”, the tool will summarise what’s been talked about and point out different opinions. This goes beyond just finding data; now it’s analysing situations and helping leaders find disagreements or unfinished decisions.
Other uses for teams:
Strategy: Putting together customer feedback from Slack, survey results from Google Slides, and main topics from support tickets to plan roadmaps.Reporting: Making campaign summaries by getting data from HubSpot, briefs from Google Docs, and key points from emails.Planning: Helping engineering leads plan releases by checking GitHub for open tasks, checking Linear for tickets, and checking Slack for bug reports.
Addressing enterprise AI governance and implementation
For CISOs and data leaders, sharing intellectual property with an AI model is a big risk. OpenAI is dealing with this by focusing on admin controls and data privacy.
The most important control is that the system respects your current company permissions. OpenAI has ensured that ChatGPT can only see the enterprise data that each user can already see.
ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu admins can manage access to apps and create custom roles. OpenAI says it doesn’t train on your data by default. It also has security features like encryption, SSO, SCIM, IP whitelisting, and a Compliance API for logs.
But, tech leaders should know the limits. It’s not perfect yet. Users have to pick it when starting a conversation. Also, there’s a trade-off: when company knowledge is on, ChatGPT can’t search the web or make charts. OpenAI is working to fix this soon.
The tool’s usefulness depends on its ecosystem. It’s launching with key platforms and adding connectors for tools like Asana, GitLab Issues, and ClickUp, copying the strategies of IBM watsonx and SAP Joule.
OpenAI’s enterprise data knowledge surfacing is the next step for AI assistants like ChatGPT, moving them into the private core of businesses. It tries to solve the AI problem: connecting models to the data where work happens.
For business leaders, this means:
Check your data: Before using this, CISOs and CDAOs must check that data permissions in SharePoint, Google Drive, etc., are correct. The AI will only respect those permissions, so if they’re too open, the AI will show that weakness.Pilot with tricky tasks: Instead of rolling it out to everyone, find specific workflows that are slowed down by scattered info. Preparing client briefings or making cross-department reports are good places to start measuring results.Set expectations: Teams must know the limits. Having to manually turn it on and not being able to search the web at the same time are big limits to consider.Watch the ecosystem: The tool’s value will depend on its integrations. CIOs should compare the tool’s connector list to their company’s tech.Compare to current platforms: See how this compares to the AI solutions from Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce. The decision is quickly becoming about which data ecosystem offers the most secure, integrated, and cost-effective path.
OpenAI’s new company knowledge feature shows that the most important thing for generative AI is now secure and useful data integration, not just how good the model is.
This latest ChatGPT feature should make things much faster by getting rid of enterprise knowledge silos, but it also makes data governance and access control more important than ever. For business leaders, this tech isn’t a simple fix. Instead, it’s a good reason to get their data organised before others do.
See also: OpenAI data residency advances enterprise AI governance
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