ChatGPT is OpenAI's general-purpose AI assistant and the default starting point for most teams adopting AI. It handles everyday knowledge work in one place: drafting and editing copy, summarising documents, analysing spreadsheets and data files, researching with live web access, generating images, writing and debugging code, and holding natural voice conversations.

For founders and small teams, the appeal is breadth without setup. You can move from a customer email to a pricing analysis to a landing page draft in a single thread, upload files for context, and save reusable instructions so the assistant keeps your tone and background details. Custom GPTs let you package a repeatable workflow — onboarding answers, investor FAQ, support triage — and share it with the team, while Projects keep related chats, files and instructions grouped.

Business and Enterprise plans add shared workspaces, admin controls, SSO, longer context and a commitment that workspace data is not used to train models. Developers can move the same capabilities into their own product through the OpenAI API, which makes ChatGPT a practical proving ground before shipping AI features.

Where it fits: use ChatGPT as a horizontal assistant across the company, and pair it with purpose-built tools when you need deep integration with internal systems, permission-aware enterprise search or agentic workflows over your own data.