ChatGPT’s New “Company Knowledge” Turns AI Into the Enterprise Brain – UC Today
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How ChatGPT’s latest feature, “company knowledge”, aims to upend workplace search, knowledge management, and collaboration by elevating AI into a business hub
Published: October 27, 2025
Kieran Devlin
OpenAI has launched its new “company knowledge” feature for ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Education users, potentially signalling something more ambitious than just another AI-powered productivity upgrade.
It’s pitched as a bid to turn the world’s most famous chatbot into an enterprise intelligence layer, one capable, in theory, of understanding not just language, but the context in which an organisation operates. For IT and business leaders alike, the implications possibly stretch beyond just prompt engineering. They suggest a viable future in which AI isn’t a tool beside the workflow, but the lens through which all work is viewed.
Every company faces a paradox: it has too much information but too little knowledge. Messages, documents, and tickets live in separate silos, such as Slack, SharePoint, Google Drive, and GitHub, rarely speaking the same language. The result is wasted time, duplicated effort, and poor decisions.
OpenAI’s answer is company knowledge, a GPT-5-powered capability that can scour all those sources simultaneously and return a single, contextualised answer, complete with citations to the original data. According to OpenAI, this makes ChatGPT “a conversational search engine” for the workplace.
In practice, a manager could ask: “Where did we land on next year’s goals?” and receive a synthesis of Slack threads, Google Docs, and emails, all linked back to the source.
OpenAI’s feature announcement blog wrote:
“Every response includes clear citations so you can see where the information came from and trust the results.”
For CIOs and CISOs, trust is non-negotiable. OpenAI stresses that Company Knowledge respects existing permission frameworks. ChatGPT can only access data that each user is authorised to view. Administrators can also manage which apps are connected, apply group-level permissions, and monitor conversations through the Enterprise Compliance API.
Equally important, OpenAI says it never trains its models on customer data by default. That assurance, combined with encryption, SSO and SCIM controls, and IP allow-listing, is designed to meet enterprise-grade compliance expectations.
Still, cultural trust remains a hurdle. Many firms are reluctant to give any external AI visibility into internal communications. For early adopters, transparency about data flow and clear ROI metrics will be key to internal buy-in.
Under the hood, Company Knowledge is powered by a variant of GPT-5, trained specifically to reason across multiple internal data sources simultaneously. That’s what allows it to “think while it searches,” resolving conflicting details or time-based queries such as “show our Q1 performance discussion.”
For digital workplace managers and architects, this could signify a new layer in enterprise infrastructure. The AI knowledge plane that can sit above traditional UC and content management systems. It’s not hard to imagine this layer evolving into a decision engine that drafts plans, summarises meetings, or orchestrates workflows across collaboration tools.
In UC and collaboration, the battleground has long been the interface; who owns the meeting, the message, or the call. With Company Knowledge, the contest moves to who owns the context. The AI that best unifies your corporate memory could dictate which collaboration stack dominates.
By automating contextual search, OpenAI claims to save teams hours of manual retrieval and synthesis. For new hires, this means faster onboarding; for managers, it means better situational awareness. Instead of trawling archives, they can ask, “What did we learn from the last launch?” and get a sourced, structured answer.
This move puts OpenAI in direct competition with the likes of Microsoft’s Copilot, Anthropic’s “Skills” for Claude, and enterprise search vendors such as Glean. For UC and workflow vendors, the question now is whether to integrate with OpenAI’s knowledge layer or risk being disintermediated by it.
Consider a leadership team preparing its Monday morning update. Normally, it requires hours of sifting through Slack channels, ticket systems, spreadsheets, and project notes. With company knowledge active, a simple prompt could produce a briefing in minutes, complete with citations from every relevant source. It’s decision velocity as well as efficiency.
The productivity gains compound across departments. Marketing teams could synthesise customer feedback; engineers could consolidate bug reports; service teams could surface escalations, all through one interface.
Despite the promise, adoption will hinge on practical realities. The number of supported connectors remains limited; legacy systems will require custom integration. Hallucination risks inevitably persist, even with citations. Additionally, the feature currently disables web search and visualisation tools when active, a friction point for users accustomed to fluid workflows.
Then there’s the strategic question. If OpenAI becomes the enterprise’s knowledge layer, what does that mean for data sovereignty and vendor lock-in?
Last week, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, a next-generation AI-powered web browser that integrates ChatGPT directly into internet navigation.
Initially available on macOS, Atlas combines real-time page summarisation, interactive search, and in-line text editing with an “Agent Mode” that automates tasks like booking or email drafting. Its memory system personalises experiences while preserving user control over stored data.
The interface, featuring split-screen browsing with an active ChatGPT thread, positions the AI as a constant companion. With a team that includes veterans from Chrome, Firefox, and Apple, OpenAI aims to redefine the browser by merging productivity, context, and generative AI into a single platform.
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