AI is becoming your morning briefing, and the media should worry

By tapping into your history and habits, ChatGPT Pulse turns passive news into a tailored briefing media might never match.

This week OpenAI announced a ChatGPT integration with Slack. The rollout was deceptively lowkey (the company deferred the usual blog post with a simple reveal on LinkedIn), but injecting the world’s most popular chatbot into a place where several millions of people are typing feels like a big deal.

Moreover, it’s part of a pattern with AI news lately: The updates that are moving the needle aren’t about performance—enormous context windows, shrinking latency, beating the math olympiad et al. They’re about pairing AI with the right context. ChatGPT Pulse, a new feature that leverages your chat history to create a new kind of morning briefing, is definitely in this vein. After using it for a few days, I’m impressed with its utility, curious how far it can go, and concerned about what its potential success could mean for the informational ecosystem that performs this task now—i.e. the news media.

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AI is changing the rules. Make sure you know how to play the game.

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ChatGPT Pulse is our first taste of a proactive AI assistant (Credit: Midjourney)

ChatGPT Pulse has a secret weapon: you

When it’s time to face the day first thing in the morning, everybody needs information—about the weather, about their calendar, about what’s going on in the world. Most of us collect this manually, relying on habits like tuning in to the radio, opening our favorite news apps, scanning calendars, and the like. But a fortunate few have personal assistants who proactively gather all of it, delivering a customized, prioritized briefing.

That, as far as I can tell, is exactly what ChatGPT Pulse aims to be: a digital assistant in the truest sense. Pulse is a relatively new feature in ChatGPT, debuting in late September. It’s available only to ChatGPT Pro subscribers, the $200 monthly tier, though the company says it plans to bring it to Plus ($20/month) users soon.

Publishers are finally standing up to Google. What comes next?

Once you configure Pulse by selecting your preferred topics (among other options), Pulse compiles a fully personalized daily feed. And it’s not just headlines—Pulse taps into your chat history, email, and calendar for deeper context, delivering an ultra-customized summary.

ChatGPT Pulse is arguably an inflection point in our relationship with artificial intelligence. What sets it apart from earlier AI products is that it transforms AI from something reactive into something proactive. Intelligence is no longer something you go to with a specific query—it’s now pushed to you even when you’re not actively engaging with it.

How Pulse is a different kind of aggregator

That’s a pretty big shift, and one with a lot of potential. If Pulse catches on, it’s inevitable that media, marketing, and PR companies will scramble for its attention. And where attention flows, advertising dollars are quick to follow. Pulse, in many ways, looks like a foundation for a future ad platform for OpenAI, which, given its ambitions, needs all the cash it can get.