Pattern: Chat Plugins Evolve into Persistent Cloud Agents — Custom GPTs → Workspace Agents Marks the Transition

OpenAI·medium signal

OpenAI explicitly positioned Workspace Agents as the evolution of Custom GPTs: same builder surface but now Codex-powered, running continuously in the cloud, with file/tool/memory access, deployable in Slack, and schedulable. Anthropic's Managed Agents (April 8) follows an identical pattern. The convergence signals that 'agent' now means 'persistent cloud process with identity and state,' not 'chat session with extra steps.' Builders should design for always-on agents, not request-response interactions.