OpenAI launches a Data agent in ChatGPT Work for natural-language business analytics

OpenAI has introduced a Data agent inside ChatGPT Work that lets employees query company data, get investigations into what changed, and generate interactive, shareable dashboards through conversation, without writing a query or opening a BI tool.

What's new

OpenAI frames the problem plainly: "People across every business have questions that data can answer. Why did sales slow down? Where is spending rising? Which issues threaten renewals in our largest accounts, and what should we fix first? Getting those answers often means waiting for a report or asking someone else to run the analysis." The fix, per the company: "We're introducing a new Data agent in ChatGPT Work to help more people answer those questions themselves. It connects to your company data, investigates what changed, and builds interactive dashboards you can share. Direct and refine the analysis in one conversation, without writing queries or learning a new analytics tool."

The agent connects to common enterprise data sources including Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, ClickHouse, Databricks, MongoDB, and Snowflake, plus files from Google Drive and SharePoint, and it can read from and work alongside existing BI dashboards in tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Sigma, and ThoughtSpot rather than replacing them outright. OpenAI says adoption inside its own company has been fast: nearly all of its product team and over two-thirds of its go-to-market organization already use data agents in ChatGPT Work to analyze company data themselves. Alpha customers named include NTT Data, Thermo Fisher, and ServiceTitan, using it for tasks like sales analysis and spend tracking.

Context

The release extends ChatGPT Work's push into enterprise workflows beyond drafting and coding, following a string of 2026 features aimed at making ChatGPT a daily operating layer for non-technical staff rather than a chat window. It also puts OpenAI in more direct competition with both traditional BI vendors and other AI-native analytics entrants that have been racing to let business users skip SQL and query builders entirely.

Why it matters

A data agent that plugs into the data warehouses and BI tools companies already run — rather than asking them to migrate to a new platform — lowers the switching cost that has slowed AI-analytics adoption elsewhere. OpenAI citing its own internal usage numbers (nearly the whole product org, two-thirds of GTM) is a notable dogfooding data point that doubles as a sales pitch: it's evidence the tool works well enough that OpenAI's own teams prefer it to asking a data analyst.