What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is OpenAI’s general-purpose assistant. You describe a task in plain language and it drafts, rewrites, summarises, explains or analyses. It is the default starting point for most people because it is competent across a very wide range of work rather than excellent at one narrow thing.
What it does well
Drafting and restructuring text, working through a document or spreadsheet you upload, explaining unfamiliar material, and acting as a thinking partner on a decision. The custom GPT feature is genuinely useful for a task you repeat weekly — a standard report format, a proposal skeleton, a tone-of-voice editor.
Who should use it
People whose AI needs are varied and hard to predict, and anyone evaluating whether AI helps their work at all. The free tier is enough to answer that question honestly.
Who should not use it
Teams that need a specialist tool with domain guardrails — construction contract review, medical or legal work, regulated record-keeping — should choose a purpose-built product instead. And if your requirement is a repeatable automation rather than a conversation, an automation platform will serve you better.
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- Quick first drafts under 1,500 words
- Brainstorming and outlining
- One-off research questions
- Long documents that must hold one voice throughout
- Tasks requiring a fixed, auditable process
- Huge plugin and GPT ecosystem
- Good image generation built in
- Fast for one-off, shorter tasks
- Drifts on very long documents
- Custom GPTs vary wildly in quality