OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT Work on 9 July 2026 is the clearest signal yet that AI is graduating from chatbot to autonomous colleague: an agent that can plug into a business's apps, monitor inboxes, and keep working on multi-step projects while humans sleep.

Evidence For

• ChatGPT Work runs on GPT-5.6, released the same day, which OpenAI bills as its most capable model for reasoning through multi-step tasks.
• It connects to **Slack, Teams, Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive,...