ChatGPT Work Review

Work arrived on July 9 as a mode rather than a plan, which is the whole trick of it. Open ChatGPT, switch from Chat to Work, describe an outcome, and it goes away for minutes or hours and comes back with a spreadsheet, a slide deck, a report or a small web app. It runs on GPT-5.6 Sol, which reached general availability the same day, and it reaches your actual work through a plugins directory: Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Salesforce and dozens more. Tasks can be put on a schedule. Nothing about the interface has to be learned, because there is no new interface.

Against Claude Cowork, which got to this idea six months earlier and sells a desktop app to hold it, Work has one enormous advantage: it is folded into Plus at twenty dollars, into both Pro tiers, and into Business and Enterprise seats at their existing list prices. Nobody signs a new contract to try it, and for most people it is already paid for.

The reservation is the meter. Work draws on the same agent credit pool as Codex rather than a flat allowance, so one long run can eat what a week of chatting would, and anybody using both finds the two competing for the same budget. OpenAI spent August correcting its own documentation about when those limits reset, which is not a confidence builder.

The other honest caveat is age. This is a two month old product whose reliability claims are still largely OpenAI's own framing, and the independent hands on coverage that would settle them has not caught up. Excellent, and not yet proven. There is no separate charge for it: it rides on an existing subscription, Plus at $20 a month or Pro at $100 to $200, and draws down that plan's agent credits as it works.