ChatGPT Review

Still the default — but the gap has closed

ChatGPT is the tool most people mean when they say 'AI', and it remains the most well-rounded assistant on the market: it drafts emails, writes Python, analyses spreadsheets and generates images in a single thread. What changed by 2026 is that it is no longer the obvious best at any one of those jobs. Claude tends to write more naturally, Perplexity cites its sources, and Google's Gemini is more tightly woven into Workspace. ChatGPT's real advantage is breadth and momentum — the ecosystem of custom GPTs, the connectors and the sheer familiarity make it the safest first choice for a UK professional who wants one tool that does most things competently.

What it is genuinely good at

In daily use, the paid models excel at structured reasoning: turning a messy brief into an outline, debugging a stack trace, or compressing a long report into bullets your manager will actually read. The 'Advanced Data Analysis' feature is the standout for office workers — upload a CSV of sales figures, ask plain-English questions, and it writes and runs the code to answer them. The built-in image generation is the best mainstream option for anything with legible text, such as a quick social graphic or a mock-up with a caption.

Where it slips up

ChatGPT's biggest weakness is the one every large language model shares: it states wrong things with complete confidence. For anything factual — case law, statistics, medical or financial detail — you must check its output against a primary source, because it will invent plausible-looking references. The free tier is noticeably limited too, falling back to a weaker model once you hit usage caps, with the best features reserved for paid plans. Some power users also find the tone more hedged and verbose than Claude's.

The UK data question

This is where UK and EU professionals should pay attention. On the standard consumer plans your conversations are processed in the United States, and unless you switch off model training in the data controls, your inputs may be used to improve OpenAI's models. For client data, personal data or commercially sensitive material that is a GDPR risk you should not ignore. The practical fixes: disable training, never paste personally identifiable information into a consumer account, and — if your organisation handles personal data at scale — move to ChatGPT Enterprise, which offers a data processing agreement and EU data residency.