ChatGPT now includes meeting recording, cloud integration and deep research tools, marking its biggest push yet into everyday business workflows.
Featured For Everyday Business Use
With over 3 million enterprise-focused customers now using ChatGPT (up from 2 million earlier this year), OpenAI appears intent on securing its place in the core workflow of modern businesses. With this in mind, OpenAI has released some new business-focused features for ChatGPT which are designed to embed ChatGPT more deeply into the kinds of platforms, files, and meetings professionals already depend on.
Update
The latest ChatGPT feature update, designed specifically for paid users across business and education plans, introduces three key capabilities that shift ChatGPT from a smart chatbot to a practical everyday work assistant. These are:
1. Cloud connectors, which let users query documents in platforms like Google Drive or SharePoint.
2. Meeting recording and transcription, available directly inside the ChatGPT (macOS) app.
3. Deep research tools that aggregate and cite information from a variety of business apps and data sources.
It seems that each one has been designed with a view to reducing friction, eliminating app-switching, and (hopefully) helping users access, understand and act upon information more efficiently.
Search Across Your Own Files With Cloud Connectors
One of the most immediately useful additions, ‘Cloud connectors’, means users can connect ChatGPT to leading cloud services. Supported platforms include Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft SharePoint, Dropbox, and Box.
Once connected, for example, ChatGPT can access stored files like PDFs, Word documents, presentations and spreadsheets, and use that content to respond to user queries. The functionality supports both simple search (“Find last week’s planning document”) and more complex analysis (“Summarise our Q2 sales figures from uploaded reports”).
The connectors operate with full respect for organisational access permissions, i.e. only content which the user is allowed to access is returned, and all files are previewed directly inside the chat for faster referencing.
Who Can Use it?
Cloud connectors are available to Team, Enterprise, and Edu users globally. Pro and Plus users can access them too, except in the UK, Switzerland and the European Economic Area, where availability is restricted for now due to data privacy regulations.
Meeting Recording Giving Structured Notes from Live Conversations
ChatGPT now also includes ‘Record Mode’, the ability to record and transcribe meetings or voice notes, a feature available through its macOS desktop app for Team users. The tool turns spoken content into structured, searchable summaries, all complete with key points, time-stamped citations, and suggested action items.
How?
After a recording is made, the output is saved as a canvas document, which can then be edited, expanded, or turned into emails, project plans or even code. It also becomes part of the user’s searchable knowledge base within ChatGPT.
For example, a team lead could ask: “What did we agree during Monday’s planning meeting?”
ChatGPT would respond with a time-stamped summary pulled from the transcript, thereby saving the need to rewatch the recording or chase colleagues for notes.
Limitations and Availability
Record Mode is only available to users on Team plans using the macOS desktop app. OpenAI says recording sessions can be up to two hours long, and transcripts follow the workspace’s retention policies. Rollout to Enterprise and Edu users is planned, but there’s currently no browser-based option, and speaker diarisation (i.e. who said what) is not yet supported.
Deep Research Connectors For Insights Across Apps
The new ‘Deep Research’ mode allows ChatGPT to produce detailed, cited outputs by pulling together information from internal tools, cloud documents and the web. For example, rather than simply responding to queries in chat, this mode builds more structured research reports that are tailored to a given task.
Supported connectors include:
– GitHub and Linear (engineering and development).
– HubSpot (CRM and marketing).
– Google Drive, Gmail and Calendar.
– Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive.
Typical use cases could include reviewing recent project work, summarising customer conversations, or combining internal product documents with external market insights.
Users can even export the result as a professionally formatted PDF, with tables, links and citations included.
Who Gets Access?
Deep Research is available to Pro, Plus, Team, Enterprise and Edu users, excluding the UK, EEA and Switzerland. There’s no Free tier access, and setup varies by platform, but some connectors may require authentication, while others are pre-approved by admins.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
For businesses with custom internal systems or industry-specific data, OpenAI now supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This allows technical teams to build their own connectors that link ChatGPT to virtually any structured data source.
For example, these custom connectors can retrieve internal information, such as customer records, billing data or support tickets, and allow ChatGPT to query it as part of a deep research task. The results are combined with public data and other connected apps to create cohesive reports.
Access and Setup
It should be noted that MCP is only available for Pro, Team, Enterprise and Edu customers. Admins are responsible for deploying MCP connectors via a remote server. Once approved, they become available across the entire workspace.
This feature may be particularly useful for large organisations looking to integrate ChatGPT into existing business intelligence systems or build AI-powered internal knowledge tools.
Practical Use Examples
Some examples of how these features could be used to support everyday business tasks include:
– A sales manager using HubSpot data to analyse deal close rates across regions.
– A product owner recording a team call and using ChatGPT to generate a roadmap summary.
– An analyst asking ChatGPT to pull data from Dropbox and Google Drive to create a performance report.
– A developer linking GitHub to summarise pull requests or past sprint changes.
In each case, using these new features, ChatGPT can act as a kind of AI research assistant that’s able to pull from multiple sources, remember context, and suggest outputs tailored to the task.
What About Security, Privacy and Control?
With these new features, it seems that OpenAI has taken some steps to address enterprise concerns around data usage and privacy. For example, OpenAI is keen to point out that:
– Data from connectors and Record Mode is not used to train models for Team, Enterprise and Edu users.
– Audio recordings are deleted immediately after transcription.
– All connector access is opt-in and user-authenticated, and connectors only search files that users have permission to view.
– Admins can restrict or disable access to specific tools through workspace settings.
However, for users on the Free, Plus or Pro plans, OpenAI may use data from connectors to train its models if the “Improve the model for everyone” setting is enabled. Businesses on these plans may need to check this setting to ensure it aligns with their data policies.
A Step Ahead of the Competition?
This move from OpenAI looks like positioning ChatGPT as a serious contender in the growing race for AI-powered productivity. While Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini already integrate tightly with their own ecosystems, ChatGPT offers something different: broad compatibility with multiple tools, deep natural language understanding, and cross-platform flexibility.
Smaller players like Notion, ClickUp and Zoom have also added AI-powered summaries or transcription features in recent months but it seems that OpenAI’s latest update offers a more expansive set of capabilities in one interface, provided companies are willing to integrate their workflows.
There are also signs that OpenAI may expand these features further. For example, the company’s documentation notes that more connectors are in development, and that browser support for Record Mode and broader language transcription are both on the roadmap.
What Does This Mean For Your Business?
It looks as though businesses currently using ChatGPT on a Team or Enterprise plan could stand to gain some immediate, practical benefits from this update. For example, being able to search internal documents, capture meetings with actionable summaries, and generate reports from connected tools could help teams cut down on duplication, reduce time spent switching between apps, and improve the speed and quality of decisions. For knowledge-heavy sectors such as finance, legal services, software development or consultancy, these tools offer a way to bring routine research and documentation tasks under one roof.
However, the regional limitations are hard to ignore. For example, it seems that businesses in the UK, the EEA and Switzerland on Pro and Plus plans are currently excluded from using many of the new connectors and deep research features. While this is due to data privacy rules, it still creates inconsistency for organisations with teams in multiple countries, and may affect uptake in regulated industries unless a clearer roadmap for availability is published.
For others in the AI productivity space, the implications are also significant. For example, OpenAI’s approach of building connections into widely used tools like Google Drive, Outlook and HubSpot allows ChatGPT to operate more flexibly across mixed tech environments than many rivals. Microsoft and Google still have the advantage of full-stack integration, but this update increases the pressure on them to improve openness and compatibility. Smaller platforms like Notion, Zoom and ClickUp, which have been quick to adopt AI features, may struggle to match the breadth of this offering unless they build similar connector frameworks.
It seems, therefore, that what happens next may come down to usability and trust. If OpenAI can make these features accessible without excessive setup, and if organisations are confident in the way their data is handled, ChatGPT could become far more than a clever chatbot. It could start to take on the role of an always-available assistant and, crucially, one that understands the context, connects the dots, and can work quietly behind the scenes to keep teams informed, aligned and productive.
