‘The world seems to be ready’: An interview with OpenAI head of product Thibault Sottiaux
TechCrunch has published an extended interview with Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI's head of core products, discussing the company's push to bring AI agent tools to a mainstream, non-technical audience through ChatGPT Work. Sottiaux, who oversees API, agent infrastructure, enterprise products, ChatGPT and Codex, explained that the platform aims to take capabilities originally built for developers using Codex and repackage them safely and simply for everyday white-collar workers, reflecting OpenAI's broader mission of "bringing everyone along" with the technology.
Sottiaux said ChatGPT Work is being offered as part of the existing $20-a-month Plus plan to maximise accessibility, framing it as a natural progression from Codex, which was aimed at a more technically forgiving early-adopter audience. He also addressed the commercial logic behind the move, arguing that as OpenAI delivers more utility to users, they become more willing to pay for it, and touched on the challenge of deciding when AI agents should act autonomously versus when interfaces should guide the user.
- OpenAI's Thibault Sottiaux discusses new ChatGPT Work agent platform
- Aims to bring Codex-style AI agents to non-technical users
- Included in $20/month Plus plan to widen accessibility
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The rise of ChatGPT and similar tools has largely been driven by developers and technically minded early adopters, who were comfortable experimenting with coding assistants and complex AI setups. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is now trying to widen that audience by making "agent" tools, AI systems that can carry out multi-step tasks on a user's behalf, usable by ordinary office workers who have no technical background.
Thibault Sottiaux is OpenAI's head of core products, meaning he oversees several of the company's main offerings, including ChatGPT itself, its Codex coding tool, its business-facing products, and the underlying infrastructure that lets AI agents operate. His role puts him at the centre of decisions about how new AI capabilities are shaped and rolled out to different types of users.
This matters because how AI companies package and price these tools affects who gets access to them and how quickly such technology spreads through everyday workplaces. It also touches on broader questions the industry is grappling with, such as how much autonomy to give AI systems, how to keep them safe for non-expert users, and how companies like OpenAI plan to make money from increasingly capable products.