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AI & Automation

Using ChatGPT at work: Business and Enterprise plans and your data

How ChatGPT Business and Enterprise handle your data compared with personal accounts: training, retention, connected apps, sharing and admin settings.

Geidi AI Team5 min read

In brief

What it is
ChatGPT Business and Enterprise put work data under your organisation's agreement and admin settings, which personal accounts don't.
Who it affects
Organisations where staff already use ChatGPT for work on free or personally paid accounts.
What to do
Name two workspace owners, review which connected apps are enabled, and ask staff to move work conversations into the business workspace.
On this page
  1. Personal accounts: each person's own settings
  2. ChatGPT Business: what you get
  3. Sharing inside the workspace
  4. Connected apps
  5. What Enterprise adds
  6. Custom GPTs are being retired
  7. Admin settings to check on day one
  8. Where Geidi fits
  9. Sources

ChatGPT is probably already in your business. Someone uses the free version to tidy emails, someone else pays for Plus themselves, and a manager has started pasting spreadsheets in to "get the summary". None of that is unusual. The question is whether the work data going in is covered by anything your organisation agreed to.

With a personal account, the answer is no. With ChatGPT Business or Enterprise, the answer is mostly yes, and your administrator gets a say in how it's used. Here's what changes, as of September 2026.

Personal accounts: each person's own settings

On ChatGPT's personal plans, there's a setting under Settings, Data controls called "Improve the model for everyone". When it's on, new conversations can be used to train OpenAI's models. People can turn it off, and OpenAI explains how, but it's their choice on their account. Your organisation can't see which way it's set, can't enforce it, and can't get the data back if that person leaves.

That's the core problem with personal accounts for work. It's less about any one setting and more that the business has no relationship with the provider at all.

ChatGPT Business: what you get

ChatGPT Business is what OpenAI used to call ChatGPT Team. It was renamed on 29 August 2025, and OpenAI says the rename itself didn't change the plan. It's a self-serve shared workspace that needs at least two seats, with Standard and Premium seat types that differ mainly in how much people can use. Only workspace owners can buy, reassign or change seat types.

The important commitments come from OpenAI's enterprise privacy page, which covers both Business and Enterprise:

  • OpenAI doesn't train its models on your business data by default.
  • You own your inputs and outputs, where the law allows.
  • Data is encrypted at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.2 or higher).
  • OpenAI has completed a SOC 2 audit, with details in its Trust Portal.

OpenAI also says it may run business data through automated classifiers and safety tools. The classifications are metadata and don't contain the data itself. Worth knowing, and not unusual for a service like this.

Sharing inside the workspace

A Business workspace is collaborative, but not transparent. People can share a specific chat by link with other members of the same workspace. If someone outside the workspace opens that link, they can't see the conversation. If a colleague continues a shared chat, ChatGPT creates a new private copy for them rather than editing the original.

Members can't automatically see each other's private chat history. That's good for privacy between colleagues. It also means nobody else will notice if someone pastes something they shouldn't, which is why the policy matters.

Connected apps

ChatGPT can connect to services such as Google Drive and Slack, which OpenAI now calls apps (you'll also see the older name, connectors). On Business and Enterprise, workspace admins control which apps are available. Each person still has to sign in to the connected service themselves, ChatGPT respects that service's existing permissions, and OpenAI says it doesn't train on data accessed through apps by default.

Our advice: switch off every app you haven't decided to use, then turn them on one at a time with a reason. Connected apps are where an AI tool stops being a clever notepad and starts reaching into your files, and the permissions in those files were set long before anyone imagined an AI reading them.

What Enterprise adds

ChatGPT Enterprise is the step up for larger organisations or those with stricter obligations. The differences that matter most for data:

  • Your workspace admins control how long data is retained. OpenAI notes shorter retention can affect features like chat history.
  • Deleted conversations are removed from OpenAI's systems within 30 days, unless OpenAI is legally required to keep them.
  • Role-based access controls let admins decide who can create or edit GPTs, how widely they can be shared, and whether people can use third-party GPTs at all.

If your organisation has to answer questions like "how long do we keep this and who can see it", Enterprise is the tier built to give you those answers.

Custom GPTs are being retired

If your team has built custom GPTs, plan for change. OpenAI has announced it's retiring custom GPTs and recommends moving those workflows to plugins, which bundle instructions with connected apps. For affected Enterprise workspaces, retirement is planned for 11 December 2026, and OpenAI says other plans are expected to follow the same timeline. Migrated plugins start private and don't automatically give anyone else access, so someone will need to decide who gets the replacement. Our article on custom GPTs, Claude Projects and Copilot agents covers sharing more generally.

Admin settings to check on day one

If you're setting up ChatGPT Business, here's a sensible first pass:

  1. Decide who owns the workspace. Ideally two people, so it isn't tied to one person.
  2. In Workspace settings, under Identity and access, decide whether workspace discovery is on and whether join requests are accepted automatically. If you're not sure, leave automatic acceptance off.
  3. Review which apps are enabled and turn off the ones you haven't approved.
  4. Ask staff to move work conversations from personal accounts into the workspace, and to stop using personal accounts for work from then on.
  5. Put the rules in writing. Our shadow AI policy guide has a template you can adapt.

If you're still weighing ChatGPT against the alternatives, our comparison of ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot is a good place to start.

Where Geidi fits

Geidi AI offers practical AI and automation built safely on the Microsoft 365 environments, infrastructure and security Geidi already manages, with the same fixed scopes, review gates and audit trails as its managed services. If the AI tools have multiplied and nobody owns them, start with a conversation.

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