OpenAI Launches Space and Pages, Pushing Into Microsoft's Office Turf

OpenAI launched a shared workspace called Space inside ChatGPT on Tuesday, unveiling a set of features at its DevDay developer conference in San Francisco that closely resemble a full office software suite — the bread and butter of Microsoft, its closest partner since the beginning.

Space lets coworkers collaborate with the chatbot and with their own Dots, OpenAI's newly launched AI agent personas that can carry out tasks on a user's behalf, across a range of work tasks. The feature puts documents, files and AI agents in one shared environment, positioning ChatGPT as a workplace hub rather than a standalone chat tool.

"Your pages and files all live together in Space, like they would in a drive," CEO Sam Altman said during Tuesday's presentation. "But spaces feel alive." Altman demonstrated how users can give a page specific instructions, such as asking it to check a team channel and update the page with what it finds.

Alongside Space, OpenAI announced Pages, a companion word processor the company describes as "a new type of document, built for human and agent collaboration." The product appears to be OpenAI's answer to Google Docs and Microsoft Word. According to OpenAI, users can "write, research, generate charts, create images, or visualize information" in it.

The company also rolled out its answer to PowerPoint: collaborative slides. Users can create these slides by merely talking about them within ChatGPT. Once generated, multiple workers and agents can work together within them, leaving comments and making edits — functionality that mirrors the real-time co-editing features that have long anchored Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.

Partner turned rival

The announcements sharpen a tension at the heart of the OpenAI-Microsoft relationship. Microsoft has been a close partner of OpenAI from the jump, but the AI lab is increasingly going after the company's core business: workplace software. Tuesday's launches place ChatGPT in direct competition with Word, PowerPoint and Google Docs, products that generate billions in subscription revenue across the enterprise market.

The rivalry now runs in both directions. As OpenAI edges into Microsoft's territory, Microsoft and other software companies like Salesforce are busy trying to become more like OpenAI. Over the past year, both companies have released a slew of AI products as the software industry attempts to keep pace with the shift toward agent-driven tools.

Agents as coworkers

The throughline across the new features is the Dots integration. OpenAI is designing Space, Pages and collaborative slides around the premise that AI agents will work alongside humans inside the same documents — editing, commenting and updating content on their own. That design choice separates the products from traditional office suites, which have bolted AI on as an assistant feature rather than building documents around agent collaboration from the start.

For enterprises weighing productivity tools, the question becomes whether ChatGPT's agent-native workspace can displace entrenched Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace subscriptions. Tuesday's launches make clear OpenAI intends to find out.