OpenAI’s Codex adds new tools — Sites, Annotations, more plugins — for knowledge workers

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As OpenAI announced on Tuesday, 20% of Codex’s 5 million weekly active users are now knowledge workers and not coders. There is a huge market up for grabs here — and one that Anthropic is also going after with features like Cowork — so it’s maybe no surprise that OpenAI is now adapting Codex for this group of users as well.Also on Tuesday, the company announced two new features — Sites and Annotations — as well as a set of plugins specifically geared toward these users.OpenAI launches SitesThe most important of these new features is Sites. As the name implies, this lets Codex users not only create interactive websites but also share them with anyone in their workspace via a URL.“Instead of adapting work to the limits of a single tool or file, teams can create sites that fit the work,” OpenAI says in its announcement.The idea here, as OpenAI describes it in its launch materials, is to allow users to create custom dashboards, websites, and apps to, for example, host a scenario planner based on a financial model, or a place to host launch materials for a new product, with live updates on messaging, milestones, and decisions.“Instead of adapting work to the limits of a single tool or file, teams can create sites that fit the work.”As OpenAI describes it, “the updates point to a different model for workplace AI: not just a chatbot that answers questions or an agent curated to one experience, but a workspace where teams can bring in role-specific context, create work, inspect and refine the output in place, and turn it into an interactive tool other people can use.”To expand on this, OpenAI is working with partners such as Wix, Base44, Replit, Lovable, Figma, and Emergent to enhance these sites with their respective capabilities.Business and Enterprise teams will be able to use Sites in the Codex apps.Credit: OpenAI.AnnotationsThe other new feature extends Annotations, which OpenAI already launched for developers when it began previewing Codex as the company’s desktop super app earlier this year. With this, Codex users can point their agent to a specific section of a document, slideshow, spreadsheet, or site, and have it make changes to that section (or use that selected part as context for something else).This is possible because, with some of its recent updates, Codex can now open these documents directly in the app.Developers were already able to do this with code and Markdown files, for example, but this update now also opens this up to knowledge workers and the documents they tend to work in.Annotations in Codex. Credit: OpenAI.More PluginsFinally, OpenAI is also launching a set of new plugins. These are bundles of apps, skills, and integrations, and each new plugin caters to specific types of work. For now, all of these are curated by OpenAI itself, but the plan is to enable the company’s partners to make their own plugins available directly in Codex and ChatGPT.The new plugins include a data analytics plugin that can work with data from tools like Snowflake, Databricks, Hex, and Tableau, while the new sales plugin can help sales teams prep for customer meetings using data from Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and other tools. There are also plugins for product design and investment banking.Credit: OpenAI.Coming soon to Code are plugins for corporate finance, private equity investing, marketing strategy, strategy consulting, and legal. This list of verticals sounds awfully similar to the plugin collection Anthropic released for Claude Cowork earlier this year, but then, these are also the kind of document-centric verticals where AI agents can currently do some of their best work.The post OpenAI’s Codex adds new tools — Sites, Annotations, more plugins — for knowledge workers appeared first on The New Stack.