ChatGPT Business for SMEs: alone, connected or as a system

Someone in your business probably tried ChatGPT privately first, then for a quote, then for almost everything. That is not a mistake but a good sign: your team found out for itself where AI helps day to day. The open question is how far it takes you.

This article belongs to our series of comparisons. Each one answers the same six questions, so you can lay the options side by side. We read the providers’ prices and features on their own pages on 14 October 2026; the sources are listed at the end.

What you use today

ChatGPT Business, formerly ChatGPT Team, is OpenAI (An AI provider runs language models and sells access to them, for example OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude) or Google (Gemini).)’s plan for companies of two people or more. In Switzerland a seat costs CHF 15.– per person per month billed yearly and CHF 19.– billed monthly, excluding VAT. If you need more usage, a premium seat costs CHF 75.– to 95.–. For five people on standard seats you pay CHF 75.– to 95.– a month.

Where ChatGPT is strong

Honestly: in a lot. ChatGPT Business brings OpenAI’s current models, projects the team can share, large file uploads and deep research. It connects to Google Drive, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams and Slack and searches whatever you allow there. Codex writes code, and with scheduled tasks and workspace agents (An AI agent carries out several steps of a defined task. A person decides before it sends anything outside your firm or spends money.) ChatGPT handles recurring work even without an open chat window.

The Business plan is grown-up on privacy too: by default OpenAI does not train on data from Business accounts, including content from connected apps. There is a SOC 2 report and a data processing agreement (A data processing agreement (DPA) sets out how a service provider handles personal data it receives on your behalf.). Under the contract terms, inputs and outputs are yours.

For writing, ideas, summaries and quick analysis, that is a very good tool for CHF 15.– a month. If that is mainly what your team needs, you do not need us for it.

Where ChatGPT stops

The limit is rarely the model. It sits between the chat and the rest of your business.

• The chat is the workbench. Most results are produced in the chat window, and someone carries them over to the accounts, the CRM or the mail. Scheduled tasks help, but the Business plan limits them: ten active tasks at most, recurring at most hourly, with triggers only from Gmail, Slack and GitHub (A Git repository is storage for files that records every change with its date and author; GitHub is a well-known service for it.).
• Custom connections are for admins. ChatGPT speaks MCP (MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard for connecting an AI harness to other software and data sources.), the open protocol through which AI uses tools. On the Business plan, though, only admins may use developer mode and publish their own apps. Switching individual actions on and off is for Enterprise customers, and if a connection changes, the admin is not told automatically.
• The data lives in the US. European data residency for Business is still rolling out, covers storage rather than processing, and a copy of every request stays in the US for abuse monitoring. In-region processing is for eligible Enterprise customers.
• Your files stay outside. ChatGPT reaches local folders only in the desktop app and with your permission. What sits on the company drive comes into the chat as an upload, or not at all.
• The knowledge lives in the chat history. What your team works out with ChatGPT sits in chats and projects. Members of a Business workspace cannot export it themselves; the owner does.

ChatGPT connected to our platform

The first way changes almost nothing for your team: everyone keeps working in ChatGPT. We connect ChatGPT to the Jules Solutions Platform through its MCP gateway. Your admin sets up the connection once as an app in the workspace, and each person signs in with their own access.

After that, ChatGPT can do more than write. It creates tasks on the platform, reads invoices and delivery notes through the document processing, produces documents from your templates (A template is a prepared structure, for a document, an email or a folder for example, which you only complete for each case.) and searches your project files, showing the passages its answer rests on. It starts workflows (A workflow specifies what information goes in, what happens to it and who checks the result.) that talk to your systems within the agreed scope. We have already connected Bexio and Abacus, for example.

What does not happen matters just as much. The platform prepares a message to the outside or a payment, but sends it only once a person has decided. Each connection sees only the projects you grant it, and every call is in the log (A log records what a program or an AI agent did and when, so that afterwards you can trace who triggered what and what happened.), with the state before and after.

For five people that means Operator System (Operator System is our package for teams at CHF 3'500.– to 5'000.–: the shared base with workflows for the team and connected systems.) as the shared base, CHF 3'500.– to 5'000.– once, with six months of Business seat (The Business seat is one person’s access to our platform (open alpha); Pro Setup includes three months, and with Operator System it is six per person.) per person. After that, access costs CHF 199.– per person per month, or CHF 169.– billed yearly. You keep paying for ChatGPT Business as you do today.

The whole system

The second way turns things round: the work no longer lives in the chat but in your system. Each person gets a vault (The vault is a folder of your working files on your computer; we create it from the vault template.), a folder on their computer with working files and instructions for recurring tasks, organised by PARA (PARA organises storage into four parts: projects, areas, resources and archives.) and readable in Obsidian (Obsidian is a note-taking program that shows a folder of text files on your computer as linked notes.). What the team shares lives in the shared project repository, on GitHub or your own Git server, for example.

An AI harness (An AI harness is the workspace on your computer in which AI reads files and carries out agreed steps.) works in the vault. We recommend Claude Code (Claude Code is an AI harness made by Anthropic: it runs on your computer, reads files and carries out steps you describe in plain language.), but the platform is not tied to any one agent, and Codex from your ChatGPT plan can take that role too. Workflows start with a short command (A command starts a defined workflow. In Pro Setup, we set up three to five commands for your work.), with an incoming email or on a schedule. They run on your device, on a computer in your office, on our platform or with a cloud provider (The cloud means computers in a provider’s data centres on which programs run and data is kept, instead of on your own device.), as the quote sets out. AI agents handle parts of the work in sealed-off areas and propose changes; a person accepts them.

The platform runs on our own infrastructure in Switzerland. We choose the language model (A language model is the actual AI behind an AI assistant: it has learned from a great deal of text and writes an answer to an input.) with you: in the cloud with providers in the US or the EU, or as an open-weight model (An open-weight model is a language model whose weights are freely available, so it can run on your own hardware.) on your own hardware. The platform is in open alpha (Open alpha means the platform is at an early stage: we use it ourselves, and it changes all the time.), and we run our own company on it. That is why we set it up with you rather than send you a download.

For five people: Operator System plus one Pro Setup (Pro Setup is our recommended package at CHF 1'490.–: vault, workflows with AI agents, first integrations, an introduction session and three months of Business seat.) per person, CHF 10'950.– to 12'450.– once, with an introduction and 60 days of follow-up support (Follow-up support means that questions and adjustments by email and phone are included for 30 days (Pro Setup) or 60 days (Operator System) after handover.). After that, the Business seats as above and model usage (Model usage means accessing an AI provider’s language model. The cost is not included in the setup price.) with your provider.

Our verdict

ChatGPT Business is an excellent tool for writing and thinking, and hard to beat at CHF 15.– a person. If your team mainly drafts texts, works through questions and summarises documents, stay with it and save yourself our setup.

But once someone copies results from the chat into three other programs, you pay in working time. Then the first way is the smallest step: ChatGPT stays, and the work lands where it belongs. The whole system pays off when workflows should run without an open chat, when you want to decide where data and models live, and when the result should belong to you rather than to a chat history.

A tool does not replace a workflow. Which way fits depends on what your team does by hand today. ‘AI for SMEs: examine the work before choosing a tool’ shows how to find out.