The Enterprise Data War Hits OpenAI

Slack is the glue that holds OpenAI together: Everyone at the 3,000-person company constantly uses the messaging app to discuss their work, former employees have said.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that as OpenAI tried to turn ChatGPT into a core enterprise productivity app that connects to all the other apps people use for work, it wanted customers—and OpenAI employees!—to be able to access their Slack messages and files directly from the chatbot.

Last year, OpenAI and Slack began discussing such a ChatGPT-Slack integration. And earlier this year, OpenAI engineers worked on the integration at the same time they were connecting other apps such as Gmail, Google Drive and GitHub to ChatGPT, according to a person with knowledge of the project. 

Some ChatGPT customers even were able to test the feature, allowing them to search Slack messages and files from the chatbot.

But weeks before OpenAI was planning to ship the enterprise app integrations in March, managers informed the engineers that the Slack integration was no longer possible, according to a person who has worked at the company. The engineers weren’t told why.