ChatGPT for Your Team · Lesson 1 of 7
Pick the plan and set up the workspace
25 minutes. For the owner. One company workspace, the right seats, and invitations you control.
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Here's how ChatGPT usually arrives at a small business. One person starts using the free version. Another pays for a personal plan and expenses it. Someone else uses it on their phone with their Gmail address. A year later, the company's work is spread across five personal accounts, and nobody can say what's in them.
This lesson replaces that with one company workspace that you own. It takes about 25 minutes, and most of it is deciding, not clicking.
OpenAI's small-team plan is ChatGPT Business. If you've heard of ChatGPT Team, it's the same plan. OpenAI renamed it on August 29, 2025.
OpenAI describes Business as a self-serve plan for organizations that want a shared workspace, with central billing and admin controls for users, roles and access. It also says plainly that it won't train on your workspace's data. Lesson 2 covers that in detail.
Business is separate from OpenAI's personal plans (Free, Go, Plus and Pro) and from ChatGPT Enterprise, which is the sales-led plan for larger organizations. For a business of 5 to 50 people, Business is the plan this course is built around.
Make a short list of everyone who will use ChatGPT for work in the next three months. Not everyone in the company. Just the people who will really use it.
At Comfort Zone Heating & Cooling, our fictional 18-person HVAC company, Marcus (the owner) listed six people: himself, Dana in the office, two dispatchers, the service manager and the bookkeeper. The technicians might come later.
A few rules from OpenAI's pages to keep in mind:
- The minimum is two paid seats. One person can't buy Business alone.
- The maximum is 200 paid seats. Past that, OpenAI points you to Enterprise.
- You pay for every seat you buy, whether or not someone is using it. Don't buy seats "just in case." Adding one later takes a minute.
Business has two seat types. You can mix them in one workspace.
- Standard: access to ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex, plus features such as GPTs, projects, apps, company knowledge, ChatGPT agent and deep research, with included usage limits.
- Premium: the same access with higher usage. OpenAI says Premium includes five times the usage of Standard, with no 5-hour usage limit.
Start everyone on Standard. Most office work fits comfortably. If someone keeps hitting limits after a few weeks, you can move them to Premium, and Lesson 6 explains exactly how that's billed.
Write your seat count and types on the Workspace Setup Checklist.
Monthly is more per seat. Annual is less per seat, but on an annual plan, seats you add stay committed until the end of the year. Lesson 6 has the prices and a worked example.
If this is your first time with ChatGPT Business, monthly is the safer start. You can switch to annual later from the billing settings, and the change takes effect at renewal.
OpenAI's sign-up steps are short:
- Open the ChatGPT Business sign-up page in a web browser.
- Sign in with the account you want to use. Use your company email address.
- If plan options appear, choose Business.
- Review your seats, billing frequency, payment details and total before you complete checkout.
- Follow the prompts to finish setup.
The person who signs up becomes the workspace owner. Self-serve Business is paid by credit or debit card. OpenAI says invoice billing, purchase orders and bank transfers are not available on self-serve Business.
Two small settings that save trouble later.
Name the workspace. Until you change it, new people see a generic name. Go to Workspace settings, select the pencil icon next to the workspace name, and use your company's name.
Add a second owner. Only owners can manage billing, seats, sign-in settings and roles. If your only owner is on vacation, sick or leaves the company, you're stuck. OpenAI's help pages note that the last owner in a workspace can't leave it, and they recommend making sure another owner is available before changing sign-in settings. At Comfort Zone, Marcus is the owner and Dana is the second owner.
Lesson 2 covers the four roles in full.
There are three ways people end up in your workspace. Know all three.
- You invite them. Go to Workspace settings > Members, select Invite member, and enter email addresses. Owners choose the role and seat type for each invite. Sending an invitation does not buy a seat. If there's no free seat when they accept, they can request to join, and an owner approves.
- Members invite them. OpenAI's page says members can invite other members, and there is currently no setting to stop that. Owners and admins can cancel pending invitations. Check Pending invites and Pending requests under Workspace settings > Members once a week for the first month.
- They find the workspace themselves. This is called workspace discovery, and OpenAI says it's on by default for Business. Anyone who signs up with a verified email on your company domain can see the workspace and ask to join. You control it at Workspace settings > Identity & access, under User Provisioning: turn Enable workspace discovery on or off, and choose whether join requests are accepted automatically.
For most small businesses, the calm choice is: leave discovery on so people can find you, but leave automatically accept join requests off, so an owner approves each person.
Now the most important decision in this course. Write it on the Team ChatGPT Card and tell everyone:
> One work account per person, in the company workspace, used only for company work.
That means:
- No personal accounts for company work. Customer details, prices, employee matters and company documents go in the Business workspace, not in someone's personal ChatGPT.
- No shared logins. Each person has their own account. OpenAI's Business models and limits page says its Services Agreement prohibits sharing your account credentials or making your account available to anyone else.
- Invite people at the email they'll keep using. OpenAI's single sign-on page warns that a different email can create a separate account or make existing chat history appear missing.
People who already have a personal ChatGPT account have a choice when they join. They can keep their personal workspace separate and switch between the two, or merge it into Business. OpenAI says a merge cannot be undone, and the company controls access to merged content afterward. For most staff, keeping personal separate is the cleaner choice. Lesson 3 shows them how to switch workspaces so work stays in the right place.
- Count the people and pick seat types.
- Sign up for ChatGPT Business with your company email.
- Rename the workspace and add a second owner.
- Set workspace discovery and automatic acceptance the way you want them.
- Invite your first group.
- Fill in Part 1 of the Workspace Setup Checklist and the one-account rule on the Team ChatGPT Card.
Check it worked
- The workspace shows your company's name.
- There are two owners.
- Every person you invited is on the members list with the seat type you meant, at their company email.
- You know whether people can join on their own, and nobody joins without an owner's approval unless you chose that.
- The one-account rule is written down, and everyone invited has seen it.
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Next: the workspace exists. Now choose the settings that protect it.
→ Lesson 2: Settings that protect you