OpenAI Just Cancelled Custom GPT Building. What This Means

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[00:00:41] Welcome to the next evolution of the podcast, Entrepreneur School (In the AI Era). We are here to figure out how to integrate AI into the business you've worked so hard to build in a way that still feels like you.

[00:00:56] I'm your host, Kelly Sinclair, award-winning marketer turned AI platform co-founder. AI has fundamentally changed how I thought about work, systems, and what's actually possible. This show is about navigating that new reality together. It's going to be a wild ride, my friend, but I truly believe there's a way to leverage AI in a way that's intentional, human-centered, and aligned.

[00:01:22] It's an ongoing evolution, so let's explore, because AI may just be the unlock you need to achieve the life-first business you truly desire. Open AI just canceled custom GPT building and didn't tell you. And I have thoughts. So let's get into it. First of all, don't panic. Nothing that you've already built is broken. Everything you made still works.

[00:01:48] What I want to talk about in this episode is what actually changed, what I tested this week, and the bigger thing that we all need to be paying attention to. So here's what actually happened. On August 16th, 2026, personal accounts, so those are the free, go, plus, and pro tier of chat GPT, can no longer create or publish new GPTs.

[00:02:15] Here's exactly what it says on their help articles. It says, New GPT creation and publishing are not available on personal GPT accounts, including free, go, plus, and pro. Existing GPTs remain available to use. Editing an existing GPT continues to require an eligible subscription and any applicable account or workspace permissions.

[00:02:41] So I have a whole bunch of custom GPTs. I didn't get an email or anything. I just saw some buzz about this online and was like, oh, that's interesting. First, I want to clarify what I discovered in my own testing, which is that I was able to update an existing GPT that has sharing permissions on it.

[00:03:04] So any of my previously built ones that I've given access to clients or have sold, they continue to work and you can update those. What I wasn't able to do was create a new GPT for the purpose of sharing. I was able to create a new GPT for my own personal use, but not for sharing.

[00:03:26] And honestly, now that ChatGPT has the skills functionality like Claude does, I'm imagining that this just means that they're wanting you to convert things that you're using for your own internal processes into skills. And that makes a lot of sense. Skills work better than GPTs because you can make multi-step processes as one thing instead of the individual,

[00:03:51] very specific job description type GPTs that we've built in the past. So here's my take. Call it a controversial stance, but I think it's important to call out the fact that OpenAI has filed for their IPO and they're currently valued at $852 billion. So what does that mean?

[00:04:16] That means that they're going to do anything that they can to get their revenue up to justify that valuation so they have a good IPO. And interestingly, like the ChatGPT business model is not good. So like only 5%-ish of all of their users pay them anything.

[00:04:39] And it costs a lot of money to build a company like that and run an LLM and have data centers and all of the people that they have. So you do the math, okay? Enterprise is typically what big companies will focus on enterprise type clients because they pay more money.

[00:05:05] So this is why you see the features are available if you give them more money on a higher level plan. So what does this mean for you if you are a small business owner who has built custom GPTs and is using them as part of your programs or part of your sales funnel or any of those kinds of things? First of all, I think it means that you need to think about where you're building in the future. And I will get into that in a second.

[00:05:35] But here's what you can do in the meantime to just kind of add a layer of protection for yourself. Because let's be honest, you don't get notification when OpenAI or Anthropic makes a decision that affects you without consulting you. So you need to back up everything that you've built.

[00:05:57] If you haven't made a practice out of saving your GPT instructions, knowledge files, all the settings, do that. I actually just did this the other day. I built a quad skill that would help me track and back up all of the quad skills that I built because I have like 55 of them now. And downloading zip folders onto my computer is one way to do it.

[00:06:26] But keeping those all in a database is a really smart thing to do. So take a look at what you've built. Make sure they're all saved in one place. The most recent version of that one. And then if you have any clients who are actually using these, think about do you need to reach out to them? If there's anything that's changing about them? How to access them? Like go test them. Make sure they still work.

[00:06:54] Here's the bigger picture though. I think I want to first of all acknowledge the fact that business owners, creators in this online business space looked at custom GPTs and saw something that open AI probably never intended. And that's the interesting thing about AI is that we can't predict all of the use cases. And what you have probably done if you're still listening to this episode and going, oh yeah, I have custom GPTs is you built them into your client experiences.

[00:07:24] You loaded in your methodology, your training, your strategies, and then you shared and sold these tools as part of your programs. And I love it. I saw this trend. I was doing this. I saw this trend. And that's when we built an entire platform around it. Because that creativity was sitting on a risk because that was not the point of ChatGPT.

[00:07:50] ChatGPT is a consumer facing product built for the end user. You are coming in in the middle of that workflow and creating something that you're then giving to a different end user. It's absolutely at risk of changing again. ChatGPT, OpenAI can change the rules whenever they want. So as I mentioned, and as you know, if you've been on listening to the show for any length of time,

[00:08:16] you know that we have an AI platform that is purpose built for this solution. And the reason that we built Wave is because we saw the shift happening in expertise-based businesses and the overall market, the impact that AI has had on that, how it changes, how you need to deliver your expertise to your clients, what your clients actually expect of you.

[00:08:41] And the fact that information on its own is essentially commoditized now because we have LLMs that can answer questions for us. And so that is why people like you have built tools to help your clients get results faster and actually apply your knowledge. And I think this is one of the most exciting advancements and shifts that are happening because of AI in general,

[00:09:09] and so much so that we built a whole company around it. So if AI is going to continue to be part of how your business works, then I'd encourage you to stop borrowing the infrastructure and pick something that is purpose built for what you're actually trying to do. Now, of course, this sounds very self-promotional in terms of Wave being a solution. And yes, we are one solution.

[00:09:34] There are other solutions as well, depending on what you in the end want to build. So on Wave, you can build an interactive chat-based experience for your clients. You think about what do they need to bring to a conversation and what might happen inside of that conversation that will get them to the result that I'm looking for. So I've shared a lot of different client examples on here,

[00:10:01] but one that comes to mind and is a good example of how this is structured is Nicole Pearl. She is a PR coach, and she has designed her Pearl pitch desk to be just this. It is what I call a user agnostic experience that still is able to provide a customized result, which is really an elevated experience for your clients.

[00:10:26] Old school software development, as I have learned, was designed to be deterministic, which means that it always would produce an output that you could expect. That's not how AI works. LLMs are predictive, and that means they are non-deterministic. So the experience that happens when you go and engage with a chat will be different depending on what you say to it and what it is predicting its response to be.

[00:10:54] So that's the nerd level on top of this. But for Nicole's, she has the first step of her squad actually does an intake experience to create a customized document media guide for the user. And then it goes through and takes that and applies it to her research methodology, how she discerns and discovers appropriate podcasts or TV segments for that guest,

[00:11:22] and then will write pitches in their guest's voice. And that all comes from the document that is developed at the beginning of that. So that's what's really cool about the type of experience that you can build on Wave. If you're wanting to do things like a calculator tool that has a specific look and feel to the interface or other kinds of AI experiences, then Wave is probably not the right fit for you right now.

[00:11:50] But I can say with confidence that anything that you have a custom GPT doing, it translates very well over to a bot as part of a squad on our platform. So that's just something for you to consider. The whole purpose of Wave is so that we are providing the infrastructure for you that covers your data privacy, the ability for you to log in, manage different accounts,

[00:12:15] have your users, have their own accounts, their own experiences, gate the token access and the credits and all of these things that you're probably not thinking about, especially if you're thinking, oh, I can just go and vibe code my own AI tool. And yeah, you can vibe code your own AI tool, but those are the things that you're not thinking about. As a non-technical person, ask me how I know because I've just learned this, right?

[00:12:42] So please take heed that data privacy, what's called multi-tenant access, meaning the ability for a bunch of different people to log in and use your tool without their information getting crossed over to other people. These are all things that need to be put in place. And that if you don't want to worry about those things, that's why we built Wave that will handle all of that hard, annoying technical stuff for you.

[00:13:09] So here's the other exciting timing about this. Like, I actually am like, thanks, OpenAI. I appreciate the urgency and the awareness that custom GPT creators now have. Please allow me to show you what we have built that could solve your problems moving forward. The other exciting timing for me is that we have just built our Claude MCP connector for Wave.

[00:13:37] So now you can actually build all of your bots and squads. You can use and access your history and knowledge and insights that exist within your Claude account and then just sell it on Wave. I am calling this the wedding of Claude and Wave. To me, it's the wedding of the century. So move over, Taylor and Travis.

[00:14:01] And we actually have an upcoming live workshop for you on August 28th. So if you want to come to this, it's called the AI Build Lab. I will have the link in the show notes. You can use the coupon code PODCAST1 to get in for a dollar. And if you're hearing this after August 28th, don't worry. You can register and you will get a replay. I'm also running these regularly for the rest of the year.

[00:14:26] So depending on the timing, you'll just get invited to the next live session or a recording of the most recent session. So what we're going to do in that time is actually go and use the Claude skill that I built that goes through your account and determines your opportunities for what kinds of bot squads and AI tools that you could build and actually will build them and push them directly to Wave.

[00:14:53] If you have custom GPTs, we can simply convert those into bots and squads via Claude as well. It would be as easy as uploading those instructions and knowledge files into your Claude account and then connecting the MCP to push it out to Wave. And it will just get converted into what we need to adjust in order for it to work really well on our platform. And since we built our platform based on custom GPT building,

[00:15:23] it'll be very familiar to you when you log in to our creator account and see how you edit and how you adjust the different bots there. The two core differences are one, you can create a squad, which is a whole collection of bots that will share context, speak together, what we call multi-agent orchestration. So that's essentially the same concept of what a Claude skill acts like, like behavior wise.

[00:15:53] And the other thing is that you can change the LLM that your bot runs on and you can change that for every single bot and have different ones for a whole squad. And the reason to consider that is obviously cost. Different models have different costs for usage and also capabilities. So if something only requires a very simple process, it doesn't need a PhD level LLM running behind it to do its job.

[00:16:21] It can run on something like a Haiku or a lighter model. I hope you found this episode helpful if you currently have custom GPTs and you've been using this as part of your business model and you're thinking about the bigger picture impacts. As I said, there's no reason to panic. You don't have to go and change everything right now.

[00:16:43] I think we can very easily feel that urgency and FOMO and the need to do everything immediately. I know that I do. But what you should do is consider how this looks long term for your business and what solution you want to use going forward. If WAVE is the solution for you, we would love to have you.

[00:17:08] You are going to get access with the workshop to a creator trial. So we offer two week free trials of our platform for you to experiment and play around and build and see exactly what this looks like before you even have to make a commitment. So hoping to see you at the AI Build Lab on August 28th or on the replay afterwards. And I'll catch you next week. Thank you for listening.

[00:17:35] If this episode got you thinking about how AI is impacting your business and what it might look like to integrate it in a way that actually fits, I'd love to help you think that through. You can book an AI strategy chat using the link in the show notes. It's a space to talk about where you are, what's shifting, and how to move forward with intention. And if this episode was helpful, please share it with another business owner who's navigating this evolution too.

[00:18:04] And make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's coming next.