What happens when you give a smart chatbot access to all your personal data?
Is it a nightmare? Is it brilliant? OpenAI is betting you will want to find out.
Or more specifically, Sam Altman is betting your employer will want to make sure all your work email and calendar and meeting notes get handled by a chatbot—their chatbot. And Data Connectors is his play to do that.
No more Granola, no more Anthropic. No more Otter. At least—that’s their vision. Welcome to the data wars, Mad Max style.
We’re all here in the desert figuring out how to capture the most precious resource in the world: data. This underlying ruthless competition is what explains OpenAI’s move today, Anthropic’s move to cut its models off from Windsurf, and the fears around how these moves will impact smaller players like Granola or Otter.
The common thread is that everyone believes that the players who grab the data will longterm win because they will be able to offer more sophisticated reasoning across those data sets. And the open question is whether general purpose models will ultimately deliver intelligence that beats single purpose tools at these jobs. OpenAI is betting yes. Point solution companies are betting no.
This piece isn’t just about the competitive data wars though! It dives into how the Data Connectors launch works in practice, where it shines and the (quite a few) places where there are rough edges. I give you practical tips on how to use it today and dive a bit deeper into the implications of this shift in the competitive landscape for builders, founders, product strategy, and all of us just sitting there in meetings wondering where our data is going.
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