ChatGPT Voice now acts on email and calendars, and AI users carry the same workload as non-users

Ask ChatGPT out loud to find a free half hour in the calendar and put an appointment in it, and it now does both. OpenAI began rolling the update out worldwide on September 23, in the latest version of the ChatGPT app.

For the first time, ChatGPT Voice works with plugins for email, calendars and Slack. By voice it can search an inbox for a particular message, check whether someone has replied, send an email, search the Slack conversations it has permission to read, or find and cancel a duplicate charge in a connected finance app. Voice also works inside ChatGPT Work, OpenAI's agent for longer jobs, on the web and on phones. There a spoken request can produce a document, a slide deck, a spreadsheet or a website, or start a longer task in a cloud browser while the person does something else.

The user picks which GPT-6 model does the work: Astra, the most capable, released on September 3, or the medium Sol and the small Luna, moved to GPT-6 on September 22.

Until this week, talking to ChatGPT produced an answer, and a person still had to open the mail app and act on it. Now the conversation can finish with the email sent and the meeting booked, from a phone in a car or between two appointments, by someone who never touched a keyboard. What ChatGPT can do at each step, Digital Trends reported, depends on the service, the account's permissions and the access the user granted when connecting it.

Building documents and decks from the Work tab on a phone is for Plus and Pro subscribers. Free and Go users get the plugins and connected apps too.

Culture Amp surveyed about 112,000 employees at 123 organizations, and 71% said AI tools make them feel more productive. Among the heaviest users the figure was 93%.

The same people were asked whether their workload is reasonable for their role. Seventy-two percent of power users said yes, against 69% of people who do not use AI at all, a gap of three points.

An analyst who drafts a report in half the time does not get a shorter week; she starts the next item on her list, which is as long as it was before. The week gets lighter only when a manager takes items off that list, which requires knowing what the AI is for. Eighty-five percent of employees say their employer encourages them to experiment with AI, yet only 58% say leaders have explained why the company wants it. Amy Lavoie, vice president of people science at Culture Amp, said the organizations that see a real return will be the ones that decided "what they were going to stop doing with the time it gave back."

Since July 2025, employees' understanding of the career opportunities open to them inside their own company has fallen 10 percentage points, the largest one-year change anywhere in Culture Amp's data.

One chief marketing officer, in a first-person account published by AOL, wanted to get to fully automatic campaigns quickly, so the team built its own AI agent to run them. The agent could run a campaign without help. What it produced was not good enough.

So the team mapped every function in the marketing organization instead, more than 700 tasks done every day. By the CMO's count, 80% to 90% of those tasks can be sped up or done by AI, and about 40% can run from start to finish with AI agents.

The department launches about five campaigns a month. Bringing one to market used to take about 50 handoffs, people passing work to people. With AI coordinating the work, it takes 11 steps. At each handoff one person's part was finished and the campaign waited until the next person picked it up. An org chart lists people and titles, so it never shows those waits; a map drawn task by task shows every one.

A new round of interviews with 15 global CMOs finds AI taking over routine work faster in marketing than in any other business function. Their departments are rewriting job descriptions, org charts and, in some companies, the CMO title itself.