ChatGPT Business · Practical walkthrough

Work out what ChatGPT Business adds over the account you already have

Four colleagues use ChatGPT on personal accounts, two of them expensing it, and nobody knows what has been pasted where. The finance lead wants a recommendation before the budget cycle.

Task by Task15 min read + practice

What you'll make

a half-page decision note setting out what moves to a ChatGPT Business workspace, what doesn’t change and what you still have to decide.

What you'll need

a rough headcount, your current account arrangement, OpenAI’s current help pages and a ChatGPT chat to draft the note. You don’t need a Business workspace to write it. Keep customer details and employee matters out of the drafting chat. For the same decision about Claude, see what a Claude Team plan changes.

Example result.

What changes. One workspace with central billing; OpenAI doesn’t train on Business workspace data by default. What does not change. It’s still ChatGPT, and it still gets things wrong. What it costs us to find out. Six Standard seats: USD 120 a month billed annually, or USD 150 monthly. A floor, not a ceiling. Open questions for IT and legal. Who is workspace owner, since exports and deletions go through them?

1. Write down the problem you want to solve

Name concrete gaps: individual subscriptions on expenses, no owner for access, no shared workspace, or a task that keeps hitting usage limits. Note what you already have.

“Paid” doesn’t mean every work file is fine to use. Ask whoever is responsible what information can go in, and what retention and contract requirements apply.

Why this works: a note built around a real gap stops a long feature list doing the persuading.

What you should see: two or three gaps and one line describing your current arrangement honestly.

2. Check the plan facts that decide it

ChatGPT Team was renamed ChatGPT Business on 29 August 2025. Same plan, new label. If an internal document says “Team”, it means this.

Seat type	Price per user	What it includes
Standard	USD 25 a month, or USD 20 a month billed annually	ChatGPT and Codex
Premium	USD 125 a month, or USD 100 a month billed annually	The same, with higher usage limits

A workspace needs at least two seats in total and can mix both types. Prices vary by country and currency. Usage beyond the included rates is bought as workspace credits, and API usage is billed separately.

Three differences usually settle it:

Training. On a personal account, each person has to turn off Improve the model for everyone under Settings › Data controls, and nobody can see whether they have. OpenAI doesn’t train on Business workspace data by default.
Getting data back. Personal accounts can export data and delete the account from settings. In Business, self-service export and deletion aren’t available; requests go through the workspace owner. That’s a feature for compliance and a change worth telling people about.
Joining and leaving. Roles, central billing and spend controls sit with the organisation, and work stays in the workspace when someone leaves. Merging a personal workspace into Business is one-way, so leave it out of a first pilot.

Why this works: these are the facts a budget holder and IT will ask about first, and the ones most likely to have changed since someone last looked.

What you should see: the passages you’ll rely on, copied from the help pages with their links.

3. Ask for the decision note from your checked passages

Draft a half-page internal decision note comparing our current position with a ChatGPT Business workspace for [number] people.

Our current position: [your current arrangement].
The problems to solve: [your gaps].

Use four headings: "What changes", "What does not change", "What it costs us to find out" and "Open questions for IT and legal".

Use only the pasted source text for any claim about features, prices, data handling or plan names. Quote the source for anything about model training or data export. Where the source says prices vary by country, say so rather than converting currency. Don't estimate time saved or return on investment, and don't claim the plan makes any use of AI compliant with a regulation. Mark anything uncertain "to confirm".

[pasted help passages]

[number] is the headcount. [your current arrangement] is the honest line from step 1, and [your gaps] the problems. [pasted help passages] are the paragraphs you copied in step 2, with their links.

Why this works: plan names and prices have changed recently, and a model’s remembered “ChatGPT Team” is likely to be the old one. Forbidding currency conversion stops a confident “roughly £16 a seat” landing in a budget line. A plan is not a legal opinion, so the note shouldn’t sound like one.

What you should see: four short sections, every figure in USD with the country caveat, and at least one “to confirm”.

Check the result

Every number appears in your pasted text, in the same currency. Check the seat arithmetic yourself.
The training sentence separates the personal-account setting from the workspace default.
The export and deletion point is there. If it’s missing, the model has written a sales page.
“What does not change” says plainly that answers still need checking.

The usual failure: a figure that isn’t in your source, most often a converted price or a total worked out on the wrong billing interval. It looks like helpful arithmetic, which is why it survives into the budget.

Remove [the figure]. It doesn't appear in the pasted source. Replace it with the published figure and its currency, and add "prices vary by country and currency; confirm for our region". List any other numbers in the note that aren't in the source.

Worked example: a six-person finance and operations team

Fictional example. Rachel, the finance lead, has six people. Four use ChatGPT on personal accounts, two on Plus paid personally. Her line for the prompt: “Personal accounts, mixed free and paid, no visibility, two people expensing it.”

The first draft’s cost section read: “Standard seats cost roughly £16 per user, so about £96 a month for the team.” Neither figure is in the source. Rachel used the repair prompt with “roughly £16 per user … about £96 a month”, and the section became:

What it costs us to find out. Standard seats are published at USD 25 per user a month, or USD 20 billed annually: USD 150 or USD 120 a month for six people. Prices vary by country and currency; finance to confirm the UK figure. Minimum two seats. Usage beyond the included rates is chargeable through workspace credits, so the cost is a floor, not a ceiling.

The rest of the note:

What changes. All six move into one workspace with central billing and admin control. OpenAI does not use Business workspace content for training by default, replacing our hope that each person has turned off “Improve the model for everyone”. What does not change. It’s still ChatGPT, and it still gets things wrong. API use is billed separately. It doesn’t make any particular use of customer or employee data acceptable; our own policy decides that. Open questions for IT and legal. Self-service export and deletion aren’t available in Business; requests go through the workspace owner. Who holds that role? Do we need invoice billing or purchase orders, which OpenAI points to its contracted offerings?

The repair kept the arithmetic but tied it to the published currency and both billing intervals.
The note doesn’t recommend buying. Rachel’s reader needs the trade-offs, not a conclusion that hides them.
The awkward point, export going through the owner, is in the note rather than discovered in month three.

Task kit for this job: Download (ZIP) · Reusable instructions

Go deeper

Decide the seat mix rather than buying one type for everyone

A workspace can mix Standard and Premium seats, and seats are reassignable capacity, not something fixed to a person. Most first purchases should be mostly Standard: Premium is for people who hit limits often, and you can’t know who they are before anyone has used it.

Using only the pasted source text on seat types, draft three options for a team of [number]: all Standard, mostly Standard with one Premium, and all Premium. For each, say what the source says the seat includes and what we'd need to see in the first month to know we chose wrong. Don't recommend one or convert currency.

Tell colleagues what changes before the switch

If the workspace goes ahead, write two short, sober paragraphs: their work will sit in a workspace the organisation administers, export and deletion go through the workspace owner, and your own rules on what may be entered still apply. Don’t promise their personal history will transfer unless you’ve confirmed how that works.

Use a pilot to answer one open question

Pick one recurring task you’re allowed to use, record the result, checking time and errors, and agree beforehand what would justify continuing. The two-week pilot guide has the full method.