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ChatGPT Work helps small-business owners save time and money, ZDNet test finds

A ZDNet reporter's test shows ChatGPT Work can save time on email scanning, slide creation, and pricing strategy, with human review still required.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-31 20:46

The reporter said he had been testing ChatGPT Work and its counterpart Claude Cowork for several months. His first approach involved connecting Gmail to the AI, which initially made him uneasy. He adopted a safe pattern: enabling the connection only before assigning a large task and disabling it immediately afterward. In one use case, he asked ChatGPT Work to summarize recent messages from OpenAI's PR people and capture decisions, open questions, and follow-up actions. The first prompt was too narrow—it only found emails from OpenAI's internal PR staff, missing the bulk of communication handled by an external PR agency. A revised prompt with more details worked well.

Another task was converting raw data into PowerPoint slides. The reporter used a public dataset from San Francisco containing nearly 750,000 fire incident records. ChatGPT Work turned the web data into an aggregated chart and generated a slide showing the top 10 battalions with the most incidents. The output required some tweaks, such as correcting the shade of green used for ZDNET branding and adjusting margins. Still, the tool did the hard work of data extraction and aggregation in 13 minutes, freeing the reporter to do household chores. When he asked the AI to use its image features outside PowerPoint, it produced a more attractive slide.

ChatGPT Work also proved useful for in-app purchase strategy. The reporter is developing several Apple apps that will use in-app purchases, and pricing strategy is complex, especially across multiple Apple platforms. Instead of writing a feature specification, he pointed the AI at the source code folder and told it to avoid making any changes. The AI read the code and derived a solid marketing feature list directly from the code, saving considerable time and ensuring nothing important was missed. He also used the AI to identify comparable apps in the App Store and Google Play Store to inform pricing decisions.

Although the results were often useful, the reporter emphasized that human review is still necessary. He noted that ChatGPT Work performed well in data-driven tasks but struggled with aesthetics and contextual judgment. He plans to share deeper dives on individual projects using both ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork in the coming weeks.