AI is evolving at a pace that is beginning to reshape how therapists plan, create, and communicate. The newest feature to emerge from OpenAI—group chats within ChatGPT—opens a door to something far broader than individual support. It invites us into a shared thinking space, where professionals can co-create, exchange knowledge, and build clinical ideas together in real time.
The concept is simple: instead of interacting with ChatGPT alone, up to twenty people can now join a single conversation. Each participant can add content, ask questions, bring examples from their field, or collaborate on documents while the AI remains available as a full conversation member. This creates a shared cognitive environment where ideas can move faster and develop in richer directions.
From a therapy and rehabilitation perspective, this feels significant. Many of us work inside multidisciplinary teams. We collaborate with occupational therapists, psychologists, physical therapists, special educators, literacy specialists, and colleagues across languages and disciplines. Much of that collaboration happens through email threads, delayed messages, and informal discussions squeezed between appointments. The new group environment allows that entire process to become more fluid and immediate.
When tested in clinical, content-building, and planning scenarios, it revealed an interesting strength. The AI is not simply answering questions. It behaves like a supportive peer who can step back, observe, and intervene only when needed. In interdisciplinary content creation, this becomes particularly powerful.
Imagine a group of professionals drafting therapy materials together. Speech therapists contribute language goals, OTs focus on sensory integration or motor sequencing, psychologists add emotional framing, and educators ensure academic alignment. Instead of sending documents back and forth, you can see the draft evolve live, with the AI suggesting formulations, rephrasing language to be child-friendly, comparing two versions of an activity, or helping structure visual supports.
In planning interdisciplinary sessions, the group chat can support goal alignment. You can outline each objective, ask the AI to check overlap or redundancy, and generate a structured session design in minutes. For therapists who constantly balance workload with documentation demands, this creates a major time advantage.
Creative brainstorming also becomes more dynamic. When producing visuals, prompts, narrative story frames, or creative play ideas, the presence of several minds and a responsive AI provides diversity of thought that is difficult to replicate alone.
All that said, the technology brings more than excitement. It brings responsibility.
The strongest benefit appears when clinicians enter the space with intentionality. AI should not guide clinical decisions; it should support infrastructure, wording, creativity, and clarity. It cannot replace judgment, assessment skill, or reasoning. What it can do is amplify them.
Privacy naturally remains a key focus. OpenAI’s structure places group decision-making and consent at the front of the design. Group chats are optional and separate from personal chats. Memory from private conversations does not carry into the shared environment, and the AI does not merge histories between users. However, that does not replace our ethical obligations. Patient-identifiable information should never be included. Notes, reports, names, or confidential data must remain protected within secure clinical systems.
What emerges is a model of collaboration we have not experienced before. Instead of isolated conversations with the AI, we now have a genuine shared panel where professionals can think together. The result blends human insight with technical support in a way that potentially transforms workflow.
Some early applications in therapy and rehabilitation may include:
• Interdisciplinary brainstorming sessions for complex cases using de-identified clinical themes.
• Co-writing therapy manuals, parent handouts, home programs, and lesson plans.
• Developing school-based or clinic-based intervention frameworks that integrate multiple viewpoints.
• Group training sessions for students or interns learning clinical reasoning.
The value does not lie in AI producing answers for us. It lies in the structure it offers. Consistency, clarity, and streamlined collaboration are not small achievements in a field where time and cognitive load are serious challenges.
For therapists working in modern healthcare environments, this may signal a shift. We are moving from individual AI interaction toward collective AI-supported teamwork. And that change appears to be arriving faster than expected.
AI will not decide how you treat a patient. It will not evaluate speech samples for you or diagnose a disorder. But it can help you outline a treatment pathway, compare therapy approaches, or turn fragmented ideas into polished, shareable documents. Used wisely, group chats become a thinking enhancer rather than a thinking replacement.
This development is not a promise of what might happen in five years. It is available now, and early users are already exploring its potential. As therapists, we can decide how deeply we want to engage, how responsibly we want to shape this tool, and how creatively we want to use the new collaborative space it provides.