The AI tool that finally started saving you time just got a retirement date.

The tool that saved you time has a retirement date

Maybe it’s a GPT that writes your product descriptions. Or one that drafts replies to customer emails so you’re not starting from scratch at 9 p.m. You might have bought it, or built it yourself. Either way, it worked well enough that you stopped thinking about it.

On September 11, OpenAI announced it’s retiring custom GPTs. For most accounts, the date is December 11.

If your stomach dropped a little, that’s fair. You paid real money for some of these tools. Or you gave up evenings learning how to build your own, which took more patience than anyone tells you. Now they’re changing, and nobody asked you. That’s frustrating. It would be easy to decide that building anything is a waste of time when the platform keeps moving the furniture.

I read it differently.

What you were really paying for

What you were really paying for, in money or in evenings, was the work that tool took off your plate. Think of the descriptions you stopped dreading and the emails you no longer had to start cold. That work still needs doing on December 12, and OpenAI’s plan is to move custom GPTs into a newer format called plugins. The format is changing, but the job it does for you can come along.

ChatGPT for marketing keeps changing formats

You’ve done this before. Your music went from records to tapes to CDs to your phone, and the songs you loved made every move.

Tools like this are going to keep changing shape, probably faster than any of us would like. Rolling with that is a skill, and you’ve had a lot of practice.

If you bought one of my GPTs, I don’t want you to worry. I’m turning mine into plugins, and I’ll record the process and share it with all of you. That way, if you built one of your own, you’ll know what to do.

Keep building, and keep buying the ones that work

Please don’t let this put you off building tools, or buying them. The ones that take real work off your plate are worth having, whatever shape they come in next.

That tool that finally started saving you time got a retirement date. The work it does for you keeps going.