OpenAI has launched a new feature called “company knowledge” for its paid business, enterprise, and education plans. Carl Franzen reports for VentureBeat that the function allows ChatGPT to connect to a company’s internal data sources, such as Google Drive, Slack, and GitHub. This enables employees to ask questions and receive answers based on their organization’s private information directly within the chat interface.
The feature aims to solve the problem of information being scattered across various workplace applications. Instead of searching through different systems, an employee can ask ChatGPT to summarize project updates by pulling information from both Slack conversations and documents in a shared drive. According to OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, the goal is to bring all the context from a company’s apps together in ChatGPT to provide answers specific to the business.
To ensure information is trustworthy, every answer generated using company knowledge includes citations. These citations link directly to the original source documents or messages, allowing users to verify the data. The sidebar in the user interface shows which sources are being accessed in real time.
OpenAI states that the feature is powered by a version of its GPT-5 model. The company emphasizes that company knowledge was designed with enterprise security and control as a priority. The system respects the existing permissions a user has within their connected applications, meaning ChatGPT can only access information that the user is already authorized to see. By default, OpenAI does not use company data to train its models.
Administrators have significant control over how the feature is implemented. In enterprise and education plans, connectors to third-party apps are turned off by default and must be explicitly approved by an administrator. Admins can manage access for different roles or departments, for instance, by allowing the engineering team to connect to GitHub while giving the sales team access to HubSpot. Security measures include support for single sign-on and detailed audit logs for compliance purposes.
To use the feature, a user must actively select “Company knowledge” for each new conversation. While active, the tool temporarily disables web browsing and image generation. Company knowledge is now available globally for all subscribers of ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans.
