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Digital tools are a necessary part of work life for just about any office gig. But using too many apps, communication platforms, and other tools can be massively frustrating. And according to newly released research, switching back and forth between online systems is also a time thief. Localization platform Lokalise recently surveyed 1,000 U.S. white-collar workers from 11 industries to examine how digital tools impact professionals and how they feel about using a variety of online systems. Overwhelmingly, the report found that workers are frustrated by having to use many different platforms. Some 17% of workers say they have to switch platforms more than 100 times in a single workday. All the back and forth is time-consuming. On average, workers lose 51 minutes per week to tool fatigue. Yearly, that’s a loss of about 44 hours of work. The time loss makes sense when you consider just how many platforms the average modern employee has to navigate. The majority of workers (55%) are using three to five platforms each day. Almost a third (31%) say they’re using even moreas many as 6 to 10 platforms daily. The most time-consuming tools, according to employees, are email (47%); messaging platforms like Slack, Discord, and Teams (35%); video conferencing tools (22%); and calendar and scheduling apps (17%). In terms of apps, specifically, Outlook leads to the most fatigue (35%), with Microsoft Teams trailing closely behind (29%), followed by Gmail (24%) and Zoom (15%). Of course, workers don’t feel great about all that time lost to digital tools. More than half (56%) say their workday is negatively impacted by an excessive number of platforms. But regardless of how workers feel about having to navigate so many different tools, or how much time it takes to do so, they say their company hasn’t addressed the issue. A whopping 79% say their company hasn’t taken steps to cut down on all the tools or stave off worker fatigue.While the workday can be made more overwhelming due to digital tools, sadly the fatigue doesn’t end there. Employees say they feel pulled to respond to alerts even when they’re supposed to be off the clock. The majority of workers (60%) say they feel pressure to respond to pings outside of working hours. With that in mind, it’s no wonder professionals are fed up with digital tools that aren’t just complicating their workdays but also their personal lives.
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E-Commerce
OpenAIs announcements at its third annual developer conference told a lot about where the company is in its evolution. In the past, the companys executives talked mainly about new models that were smarter, cheaper, or more efficient. At the event in San Francisco on October 6, the companys leaders said relatively little about their latest models, and nothing about AGI or superintelligence. Instead, they discussed new ways to make the AI do real work that matters. Building functional agents One of the keys to enterprise customers realizing a return on their investment in AI is the creation of intelligent agents capable of completing complex business tasks. To that end, OpenAI announced AgentKit, which it said is a complete set of tools for developers and enterprises to build, deploy, and optimize agents. The tool kit has three main parts: an Agent Builder that offers a visual canvas for piecing together agents, a Connector Registry that manages how the agent connects to data and tools, and ChatKit, which lets developers create agents that users can talk to. During the keynote, OpenAIs Christina Huang used the Agent Builder to add a conversational agent that helps users find content within a website. The agent used some complex workflows, consulted documents, deployed a widget to stylize the agents colors and syntax, and pulled in pre-built privacy and security guardrails. Then she pushed the new agentall in under eight minutes. OpenAI said it has seen developers and enterprises use the AgentKit tools to build agents that do deep research, customer support, IT support, and sales functions. Apps, take two Importantly, OpenAI is also taking another shot at its App Store Moment. After launching its GPTssmall, customized versions of ChatGPTin late 2023, the company did surprisingly little to promote or enhance the program. On October 6, OpenAI announced a new kind of app that can be used entirely within ChatGPT: a chatbot that can suggest apps based on what the user said in the chat. For instance, it might suggest a Coursera app if the user said they want to learn more about some new skill. Or the user can ask for an app by typing its name into the chat. The apps themselves can take natural language directions or requests from the user, as well as display videos or interactive content within the chatbot. OpenAI provided developers with a new software development kit for building the apps. For developers, it’s a chance to get their apps in front of OpenAIs 800 million ChatGPT usersjust when a need for the app arises. Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow all made apps while participating in a pilot program. In the big picture, ChatGPT is becoming far more than a chatbot. Its more functional, and apps and agents are a big reason for that. ChatGPT now has 800 million weekly users, and its popularity is growing fast. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said during a Q&A session with reporters that the chatbot is evolving toward becoming something like an operating system. Codex, too A fierce competition has unfolded among the big AI companies to offer the best coding tool. OpenAIs entry in the race is Codex, which the company said is no longer a preview and is now generally available to all developers. Codex also now interoperates with Slack, so that developers can delegate tasks to, or ask questions of, Codex directly from a team channel or threadjust like they would a coworker. But most importantly, Codex is now powered by GPT-5, OpenAIs most advanced reasoning model, which has allowed the company to make the coding assistant aspect of the product far more capable. For developers, it feels like theyre teaming with a junior software engineer who works independently on specific tasks, then reports back with the results. These new applications of AI could help enterprises bridge the gap between a desire to deploy AI models and actually seeing some real return on investment from doing so. That may be just what OpenAI needs right now. Cash crunch The company is burning through cash to pay for model training and new data centers, a burn thats expected to accelerate over the next few years. Meanwhile, the company is likely making most of its money through ChatGPT subscriptions, not enterprise business such as API fees. CFO Sarah Friar told Bloomberg a year ago that 75% of OpenAIs revenue comes from consumer subscriptions to ChatGPT, implying a 25% share of revenue for the enterprise business. Theres little to suggest that the enterprise business contributes much more than a quarter of total sales today. Still, OpenAI probably needs to see substantial growth in enterprise business to hit break-even in the next five years. The enterprise was our first focus even before ChatGPTour first product was an API, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said during a press briefing on October 6. From day one we saw the desire on the part of businesses, but I think a few things were missing. Lightcap said that for much of the companys history, its models werent good enough to take on business tasks reliably. OpenAIs reasoning models, an important component of agents, showed just last year. In the enterprise you need to be able to execute business processes, so you needed this kind of shift toward agentic AI so that it could just do things for you, he said. Lightcap said business agents also need to be able to connect with other services (such as databases and tools), and that agents are just now getting the capabilities and technical standards (like Anthropic’s MCP protocol) to do that. Finally, enterprise users need to become familiar with agents and how they work. Lightcap said OpenAIs announcements represent real progress in overcoming those barriers: I think what you saw today is an evolution in every one of those areas.
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E-Commerce
Last week, subscribers of Microsofts Game Pass were in an uproar over plans to hike the price from $19.99 per month to $29.99. One of the most surprising reactions, however, came not from gamers, but from retail partner GameStop. While you’ll pay $30 per month if you sign up for Game Pass Ultimate directly with Microsoft, youll get the same old price — for some indefinite period — if you stick with GameStop. “Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is still $19.99 a month with us. You’re welcome,” the retailer wrote in a social media post. Gamers can subscribe to GamePass directly from their XBox, via their PC, and on the web. Those who plan to take advantage of the lower price GameStop is offering GameStop will redeem the code on their gift card via the Web. Game Pass Ultimate is the preferred subscription plan for core gamers. It offers day-one access to new first-party games like Call of Duty, as well as the entirety of an older game catalog, access to Ubisoft+ classics, and a subscription to Fortnite Crew. While $30-per-month isn’t so bad, the price increase will saddle Microsofts biggest fans with the bulk of the cost, essentially penalizing them for supporting the platform. By appealing squarely to those customers, GameStop could regain some of its relevancy with gamers. It could also lose some goodwill with Microsoft. Microsoft’s gaming division is putting all of its eggs in the GamePass basket. By undercutting the subscription price, GameStop could be cutting into the company’s bottom line. Alternatively, GameStop could be cutting into its own profit margin on GamePass gift cards. The pas de deux between retailers and publishers is a complex, constantly evolving one. Microsoft, after all, could stop issuing the cards with the $19.99 price tag on them at any time, but so far has not. While a favorite of the meme stock crowd, GameStop has squandered much of its reputation with players. For years, it was the go-to place for new releases and made millions on the sale of used games, which at one point accounted for roughly half of its gross profits. But as digital distribution became the norm in the video game world, there was less reason for gamers to visit GameStop. Midnight releases of highly anticipated games became rare events. As gamers shifted to digital, there were fewer physical versions of games to trade in, cutting into used-game revenues. Beyond thumbing its nose at Microsoft with the continued $20 gift cards for Game Pass, GameStop took another swing at the concept of virtual ownership, underlining that when you have a physical copy of the game, it’s yours for as long as you have the disc. “Game Pass: $29.99 every month. Own nothing. GameStop: Buy once. Own forever. Math isnt that hard,” it wrote. GameStop, it’s worth noting, isn’t alone in towing the line on the previous Game Pass Ultimate price. Both Amazon and Target are still selling one- and three-month subscription gift cards at the older rate. Neither of those retailers is quite so publicly poking the bear, however. Then again, neither faces the extinction-level threat that GameStop is. A year ago, Michael Pachter of Wedbush, sent a note to investors saying he expected the company to be gone entirely by 2030. GameStop has a likely runway of no more than five years, he wrote. The demise of GameStop is outside the 12-month window we use for our price target, but we expect the companys demise at some point later this decade. GameStop shares were flat Monday, closing at around $25.05. Year to date, the company’s stock is down 18%. It is, however, still considerably higher than the $3-$4 range it traded at before the meme stock traders began to focus on it.
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E-Commerce
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