OpenAI has expanded access to ChatGPT’s task scheduling tools, Engadget reports. Free ChatGPT accounts can now use the scheduling menu, a feature that had previously been limited to paid tiers. The feature lets users schedule prompts for ChatGPT to handle in the future. According to Engadget, OpenAI added a dedicated section for those scheduled prompts in ChatGPT’s sidebar in June, alongside updates intended to make scheduled requests easier to track and edit. At launch, that hub and the expanded scheduling features were available only to Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise customers. The new change opens the scheduling menu to free users, broadening access to a workflow feature that OpenAI has been positioning inside the core ChatGPT interface rather than as a separate product. OpenAI is also adding sharing for scheduled tasks, according to Engadget. That means a user who creates a useful scheduled prompt can share it with others, who can then adapt it for their own workflows. Paid subscribers get a separate upgrade: Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users can configure ChatGPT prompts to trigger when things happen in Gmail, Slack or GitHub. Engadget reports that OpenAI is making this capability available to those paid tiers “starting today.” The examples cited by OpenAI are still relatively everyday: travel alerts for an upcoming trip, notifications when new movies or TV shows arrive on preferred streaming services, or a recurring morning news summary. The more operational change is the move from manually scheduled prompts toward prompts that can react to activity in widely used work tools. For OpenAI, the update makes ChatGPT more useful as a recurring assistant rather than only an on-demand chatbot. For users, the distinction is practical: free accounts get access to the scheduling menu, while paid accounts get the more automation-oriented option of connecting prompts to events in Gmail, Slack and GitHub. Who benefits: Free users benefit from access to the scheduling menu without upgrading. Paid users gain the more advanced ability to trigger prompts from Gmail, Slack and GitHub activity. Who's exposed: Competing productivity and automation tools may face more overlap if ChatGPT’s scheduled and trigger-based tasks become easier to reuse. The extent of that exposure is still unclear from the available reporting.