Your Work Software Is Going to Change Again

Why OpenAI Raised $6.6 Billion and How Slack’s Co-Founder Saw It Coming Eight Years Ago

If you follow any technology news, you might have seen that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently raised a new funding round of $6.6 billion (yes, billion) at a $156 billion valuation.

There are several reasons why they've raised so much money, partly the cost of training models, partly the amount they're spending (and making). Axois has a good summary of that if you want to read more.

But what caught my attention were the leaked details of the deal showing that OpenAI requested investors not to invest in certain competitors: Anthropic, xAI, SSI Perplexity, and Glean.

Now, Anthropic makes Claude, xAI is Elon Musk’s AI project, and SSI is founding by Ilya Sutskever’s one of the main brains behind OpenAI and they are all building foundational models, so that makes sense. Perplexity is doing search, which aligns with where ChatGPT for consumers is partly playing. But why and what is Glean?

Glean is a workplace search tool. There's always been endless pain in finding the right work files and sifting through information, emails, or Slack/ Teams threads. Glean is solving some of these problems and doing it very well. They have a number of enterprise customers and have raised from top investors.

What does it mean that OpenAI specifically mentioned Glean? I suspect they're coming for the work software space. They want to be the next big work software platform, and in many ways, that makes a ton of sense.

What does that look like as a product? I imagine the GPT Store is a nod to the future. OpenAI will see ChatGPT Enterprise as the key software for your workplace. Need internal software or tools? Built it with OpenAI and use it in ChatGPT. External software providers will working as AI agents via the GPT Store.

This seems like the future I can imagine and I suspect OpenAI is gunning for.

My favorite ever B2B SaaS company was Slack.

One of my old companies built a companion Slack app in the very early days of the Slack App Store, and it felt like the future of work. But messaging is hard, and work communications are complex. The Slack Apps never really went beyond companion products, and Slack failed to become a platform.

I say was because Slack seem to have lost their way since selling to Salesforce, and I wonder if the bigger impact was when the co-founder Stewart Butterfield left Slack. It always felt like he understood the future in some way or the right form factor for the next generation of software.

I remember watching this clip from Stewart Butterfield 8 years ago and the quote below really staying with me. Seems like he may have predicted the future again.

If you look longer out like I mean this is not 2017 or 2019 this is maybe 10 years from now the next software product category on the order of value that office has been in terms of longevity and total dollars like hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of decades is going to be team based AI

One thing is for sure, if you want to get ahead at work, start using AI tools effectively. Ben’s Bites is a good place to start for learning.

If you want to get ahead as a company, start looking at deploying ChatGPT or Claude to parts of your organization before you're playing catch up.

It may feel like we’ve spend the last 10 years adoption new software at work, well that’s about to change again.