In addition to gobbling up most of the internet, ChatGPT now wants access to your OneDrive and SharePoint files, too.
It makes sense. One of the earliest uses of AI was to summarize documents and folders of documents, and there’s only so many times you can ask it whether Spider-Man would beat Wonder Woman in a fair fight. It would be more productive for AI to collate and make sense of your own personal information, assuming you want to grant access to it.
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT can now connect to your OneDrive or SharePoint document libraries, assuming you’re a paid ChatGPT Plus, Pro, or Team user who lives outside the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK (via Windows Central). You’ll obviously have to connect ChatGPT and give it permission to start poring over your cloud documents.
Specifically, you’ll need to enable ChatGPT’s “Deep Research” function, which normally scours the web for information. Now, it appears you can specify which folders in Microsoft’s cloud services to make accessible to ChatGPT on a once-and-done basis. Click the “down arrow” to select either OneDrive or SharePoint, then log in to the Microsoft services. You can also go to ChatGPT Settings, then Connected Apps, Connectors, and click Connect next to Microsoft OneDrive (work/school).
From a privacy perspective, you’re sharing the request with both OpenAI and Microsoft. “ChatGPT generates search queries from your prompts to locate relevant information within your connected Microsoft document libraries and sends these queries to Microsoft,” said OpenAI.
Theoretically, this should work similarly to Microsoft Copilot for OneDrive, which launched a year ago. However, Microsoft still says the service is only available to users with a work or school account, and will be added to Microsoft 365 subscribers (Personal or Family) in the coming months. Microsoft also says that Copilot for OneDrive can only work with five files at a time. OpenAI doesn’t specify any limitations at all for ChatGPT.
Things move fast in the AI world and it’s certainly possible that competition will spur Microsoft on. But for now, ChatGPT’s cloud integration looks like a more powerful option.