OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has added plugins (extensions) optimized for specific roles such as finance and design to its artificial intelligence (AI) coding agent "Codex." The move is seen as an effort to strengthen work-focused AI agents and step up efforts to win corporate customers.
On the 2nd (local time), OpenAI unveiled six role-specific plugins that can connect with Codex. The newly added plugins are six types for data analysis, production, sales, product design, stock investing, and investment banking (IB) work.
OpenAI said, "Codex's weekly active users (WAU) have surpassed 5 million, and since the desktop app launch in Feb., users have grown more than sixfold," and added, "Developers are still the largest user group, but knowledge workers account for about 20% of all users, and their growth rate is more than three times faster than developers." Here, knowledge workers include marketers, designers, researchers, bankers, and investors.
The Codex plugin launch is also seen as a response to fast-chasing rival Anthropic. Anthropic has been winning customers in the corporate AI market since launching its corporate AI agent "Claude Co-Work" in Feb. Focused on revenue growth from corporate customers, Anthropic was recently valued at $965 billion (about 1,460 trillion won), surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion valuation in Mar.
In response, OpenAI is also strengthening its corporate coding tools and AI agent capabilities. Chief Revenue Officer Denis Drescher said, "Revenue generated from corporate customers currently accounts for 40% of total revenue, and by year-end this figure will rise to 50%."
That day, OpenAI unveiled "Site," a tool that converts Codex outputs into an interactive web page so they can be viewed directly in a web browser, and also introduced an improved version of "Annotation," a tool that lets users directly select parts of Codex-generated outputs that need edits and instruct changes.
It also announced it will integrate Codex, which corporate customers mainly use, with ChatGPT, which many individual customers use, within weeks. Once Codex and ChatGPT are integrated, AI can be used seamlessly anywhere—on desktop, mobile, and in the browser. After that, it said it will begin developing always-on AI.
This aligns with a major trend in the AI industry to consolidate fragmented AI features into one place, as Anthropic has integrated most functions—coding, agents, and more—inside Claude, and Google has layered Gemini across all its products, including Chrome and Google Search.
CEO Sam Altman said at the "Intelligence for Work" event held that morning, "Corporations want OpenAI's AI agents to be connected to all of the company's information and to always run in the background."
He then defined OpenAI as a corporation building "a new intelligence infrastructure for the AI era." He emphasized, "Like past cloud services that provided computing resources to corporations, OpenAI will be a corporation that provides intelligence as a new kind of infrastructure," adding, "We do not intend to compete with you."
As the most important change to watch, he pointed to the emergence of 24/7 always-on "proactive AI." Whereas existing AI worked passively, requiring users to request what they wanted via prompts (instructions), going forward "proactive AI" that performs necessary tasks on its own before being asked will spread.