ChatGPT Work just landed, here's how to start using it today

Open ChatGPT this week and something looks off. There's a new layout, a new set of icons, and a mode you've never seen before. No, you didn't get hacked, and no, your settings didn't reset. OpenAI quietly rebuilt the entire product, and the new version is called ChatGPT Work.

This isn't a small UI tweak. It's the biggest structural change to ChatGPT since plugins first launched, and if you're still using it like a fancy search bar, you're leaving most of the value on the table.

What is ChatGPT Work, exactly?

ChatGPT Work is an agent in ChatGPT that helps you take on more ambitious tasks, gathering information across your apps and workflows to create finished materials. Instead of just answering a question and handing you a wall of text, it goes out, does the research, and comes back with an actual deliverable — a spreadsheet, a slide deck, a report, or even a working web app.

It's an agent that can gather information across your apps and workflows to create finished materials like sheets, slides, docs, and web apps, and stay with complex projects for hours by breaking them into smaller steps and completing them independently. That last part is the key shift — it's not a single back-and-forth exchange anymore. It's closer to delegating a task to a coworker and checking in on progress later.

Under the hood, ChatGPT Work integrates nearly every major piece of technology OpenAI has been working on in recent months, and it's powered by the new family of GPT-5.6 models. Those models come in three tiers — Sol, Terra, and Luna — and Terra performs similarly to GPT-5.5 but is 2x cheaper, while Luna offers strong capability at OpenAI's lowest price point. Practically, that means you get more agentic power without automatically paying flagship-model prices for every task.

The official rundown lives on OpenAI's ChatGPT Work page and the interactive product page at chatgpt.com/work, both of which are worth bookmarking as the feature keeps expanding.

Why did ChatGPT get a whole new interface?

For a while, OpenAI has been trying to merge three separate products — regular ChatGPT, the Codex coding agent, and the Atlas browser — into one app. The release includes a new ChatGPT Work agent, an upgraded ChatGPT desktop app with Codex included, and a new hosted sites service for OpenAI customers.

If you had Codex installed already, don't be surprised by the rebrand. The existing ChatGPT app is now called ChatGPT Classic, and Codex is now the new ChatGPT desktop app — it still looks like Codex and includes the Codex icon as an option, but it's now called ChatGPT. Inside that new desktop app, ChatGPT for desktop includes both ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Codex, which share plugins, though Codex mode shows more technical detail while Work abstracts that away from the user.

Translation: Work is the friendly, non-technical front door. Codex mode is still there underneath for developers who want to see the raw steps.

Which plans get ChatGPT Work?

Availability rolled out in phases. ChatGPT Work became available first for Pro, Enterprise, and Edu plans, then expanded to Plus and Business plans shortly after. As of now, it's available to all plans on macOS and Windows desktop, and to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu on web and mobile.

If you're on a free plan, you may not see it yet — but the desktop app rollout suggests that's changing fast.

How do you actually connect ChatGPT Work to your tools?

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it's the one that makes or breaks the experience. ChatGPT Work is only as useful as the context you give it.

To get started with ChatGPT Work, connect the tools and context where your work already happens using plugins — plugins connect ChatGPT to apps and systems like Slack and Microsoft Teams, Google Drive and SharePoint, email, calendars, CRMs, project trackers, and other internal tools. There's now more than 1,400 plugins available, letting ChatGPT pull context from the tools and workflows you already use to help move projects forward.

Here's the actual setup flow:

Open the ChatGPT desktop app (or chatgpt.com on web) and switch to Work mode.
Click into the plugin directory — a new unified plugin directory lets you connect ChatGPT to your favorite apps and tools.
Connect the handful of tools you use daily — your calendar, your email, Slack, and whatever storage you rely on (Drive or SharePoint).
In any prompt, type "@" followed by an app name to force ChatGPT to pull from that specific source. ChatGPT will automatically know when to reference a plugin based on your prompt, but you can also direct it to pull context from a specific app this way.

Don't connect everything on day one. Start with the two or three tools you touch most and expand from there — a bloated plugin list just adds noise ChatGPT has to sort through.

What does a real ChatGPT Work session look like?

Most people default to typing a request and hitting enter, the same way they used regular ChatGPT. That works, but it skips a step that changes the quality of the output dramatically: Plan mode.

In Plan mode, ChatGPT gathers context, asks questions, and creates a step-by-step plan, and you can suggest changes or approve the plan to start the work. Instead of guessing what you meant and running with it, the agent shows its homework first. If it's about to misunderstand your ask, you catch it before it burns 20 minutes producing the wrong deliverable.

A few real prompt examples pulled straight from OpenAI's own use cases:

"Turn my calendar, messages, and docs into a weekly brief with priorities, risks, decisions, and follow-ups."
"Analyze this survey feedback in Google Sheets — pull themes, representative quotes, open questions, and a short team update."
"Find the emails I need to answer, summarize each one, draft replies, and leave them unsent for review."

Notice the pattern — every one of these ends in a finished artifact, not just an answer.

What can ChatGPT Work actually produce?

The four main output types cover most knowledge work: spreadsheets come with formulas and summaries so a messy CSV can become a budget tracker, slide decks are built from outlines or meeting notes ready to present, and long-form documents like proposals and research briefs come out structured and formatted.

Then there's Sites — arguably the sleeper feature of this whole release. Through the Sites feature, still in public beta, it builds interactive web apps such as calculators, signup forms, dashboards, and internal portals. Sites lets you turn ideas, plans, and data into interactive websites and web apps that are easy to share with your team, including dashboards, project trackers, launch calendars, and prototypes that stay up to date as information changes.

That's the "get a quote" style mini-app you might have seen in demos — you build the form, connect it to logic, and the site stays live and functional, not just a static mockup.

Can ChatGPT Work run tasks while you're away from your desk?

Yes, and this is where it stops feeling like a chatbot. ChatGPT Work includes support for task scheduling, meaning you can tell the agent to start working on something from your phone and it will chip away at the assignment remotely. After you return to your desk, you can track its progress through your web browser or the ChatGPT desktop app, and through the desktop app, ChatGPT Work can use its built-in computer use capabilities to carry out tasks across your apps and web browser, moving files if needed.

Practically: you fire off a task on your phone during your commute — "pull last week's numbers and draft the Monday update" — and by the time you sit down, there's a finished draft waiting, not a blinking cursor.

What's the one habit that separates good results from bad ones?

Write a tight brief. Vague requests get vague plans. The agent works best when you tell it the format you want, the source data to pull from, and what "done" looks like. If you're unsure where to start, the OpenAI release notes page tracks every new capability as it ships, which is useful since this product is changing weekly.

A quick pro habit: type "/" in the prompt box to surface built-in presets and tool shortcuts. It's a small thing, but it saves you from typing out instructions ChatGPT already has templated.

Is it worth switching over now?

If you're currently using ChatGPT purely for quick answers, you don't need to change anything. But if any part of your week involves turning messy inputs — emails, spreadsheets, meeting notes — into a finished document someone else will read, ChatGPT Work is built specifically for that gap. More than 1 million people already use the underlying Codex technology for work outside software development, which shows how far these agentic capabilities have moved beyond writing code.

Connect two tools, write one real brief, and let it run. The gap between "ChatGPT answered my question" and "ChatGPT finished my task" is bigger than it looks — and it's the entire reason this update exists.