ChatGPT's new connections signal a big shift

Welcome back to Building AI Agents, your biweekly guide to everything new in the field of agentic AI!

Thank you to all of you who pointed out my misspelling of Yoshua Bengio’s name in last Thursday’s issue. My deepest apologies—we hold ourselves to a higher standard of quality here at Balding AI Agents.

In today’s issue…

• ChatGPT’s new integrations—and what they mean

• Amazon forms elite new agent development team

• Microsoft’s Agentic AI hackathon

• When will we pay a premium for AI labor?

• How people are making money selling agents

…and more

🔍 SPOTLIGHT

Finding connection in the internet age can be hard, and that’s just as true for AI as it is for humans.

Last Wednesday, OpenAI announced a new set of features for ChatGPT’s business tiers, including flexible pricing, the ability to transcribe and summarize meetings, and—much more notably—connectors that allow ChatGPT to access widely-used productivity apps like Google Drive, Gmail, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and more. In addition, users can now build model context protocol (MCP)-based custom connectors to their internal databases and tools.

The reason for this slew of new tools is clear: integrations are now king. In the early days of AI agents, the main limitation on their usefulness was model intelligence—large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5 were too forgetful, too prone to misunderstanding instructions, and, in many cases, too plain stupid to perform anything but basic tasks.

But as models have become much smarter, the bottleneck has shifted to their ability to connect with the outside world. Knowledge workers often use dozens of apps per day: email, messaging, word processing, web searching, and a host of internal tools and external SaaS products. LLMs, operating through text rather than visual interfaces, need specialized connectors to integrate with these platforms. A year ago, agent builders complained about the stupidity of LLMs; now, we complain about the stupidity of SaaS providers that don’t let their products connect to LLMs.

Enter companies like Zapier, Postman, and Firecrawl, who have built their entire businesses around connecting automation tools with external software and APIs. As AI agents have become the automation tool to end all automation tools, that business is booming. Low-code agent frameworks like n8n have also exploded in usage by offering libraries of integrations with hundreds of external apps.

Now, OpenAI is coming to play in the integration space. ChatGPT—or at least its enterprise versions—now looks a bit more like a data analyst, administrative assistant, software engineer all rolled into one. With the ability to add additional integrations using MCP, this list of roles expands tremendously.

Additionally, I predict that these same specialized connectors will soon be coming to the OpenAI API. MCP support already has. The company has recognized that making smart models isn’t enough—if you want to want people to use them, they need to connect with the world.

In agentic AI, integrations are the new battleground.

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