Emergent vs. OpenAI: The Builder vs. The Brain

Welcome to the comparison of artificial intelligence. OpenAI is the name that everyone knows, from boardrooms in Silicon Valley to your grandmother’s knitting circle. Emergent is the scrappy, energetic challenger in the other corner that promises to stop talking about work and start making the tools to do it.

If you’re looking for a digital workforce, these two choices can be hard to pick between, like hiring a genius consultant or a master architect. Are they doing the same thing? Do they talk to one another? Will one of them finally choose to keep you out of the office?

The Two Ways of Thinking

To see the difference, you need to know what these companies think a “digital employee” really is.

OpenAI sees the digital worker as a brain in a jar. It is intelligence in its most basic form. When you use ChatGPT, you’re using a super-mind that has read almost every book that has ever been written. It can write poetry, fix bugs in Python, and break down quantum physics all at the same time. But it’s only for a short time. If you want it to “do” something, like file your taxes or manage a database, you usually have to build the arms and legs yourself. You are required to write the code that connects the powerful system to your actual files and systems.

Emergent does things in a very different way. They don’t just want to give you a smart person to talk to; they want to give you a software engineer. Emergent thinks that a digital employee is more than conversing; it’s a piece of software. Emergent doesn’t just talk back when you ask it to do something. It makes code. It makes a database work. It gives you a clickable frontend interface. It’s like inquiring on how to build a house (OpenAI) and then hiring a contractor with a truck full of lumber and a nail gun (Emergent).

The Process of Hiring: Emergent vs. OpenAI

Picture this: you own a logistics company, and you have a terrible problem: invoices. They come in as PDFs, images, and text files with strange formatting through email. You need a digital worker to clean up this mess.

The first step in hiring OpenAI for this job is to talk to them. You start ChatGPT and pull in a file. It works like magic: it reads PDFs and tells you how much it costs. But, you get 500 of these every day. You can’t pull them in one at a time. You now have to become a developer to turn it into an actual, working “employee.” You need to make a Python script monitoring your email inbox. 

You need check the response, which could change format if the AI gets creative. Next, you have to link that to your accounting software. All of a sudden, “hiring” OpenAI wasn’t just a $20 subscription; it was a three-week project that involved API keys and server hosting.

Let’s now look at the Emergent experience. When you log in, you don’t just chat; you direct. You write something like, “Make me an app that processes invoices.” It should let my team upload PDFs, use OCR to get the vendor and amount, save that information to a database, and give me a dashboard where I can click “Approve” to send it to Xero.

Emergent doesn’t just say, “Here’s a plan.” It begins to code. It makes a React frontend so your team can go to a website. It writes code, it makes the database that keeps track of the history of invoices. In a short amount of time, you won’t just be looking at text on a screen; you’ll be logging into a working software program that Emergent made for you. You didn’t have to know server setup or handle an API. You just told Emergent what kind of employee you wanted, and they made everything and workflow for them.

The Intelligence Factor: Emergent vs. OpenAI

OpenAI is the best when it comes to pure IQ, like being able to solve a hard puzzle or write a Tarantino-style screenplay. The GPT-4 and O1 series of models are the best in the business. They are the “brains” behind most of the work in the field.

This is the secret that makes this comparison interesting: Emergent doesn’t want to be a better brain than OpenAI. Emergent actually uses OpenAI to do the hard work of figuring out what you want.

Emergent is very specific intelligence. It has learned how to code and design. OpenAI knows a little bit about a lot of things, but Emergent knows everything there is to know about making software. If you ask OpenAI to write code for a complicated app, it might give you pieces that are 90% correct, however, it has to be copied and pasted into different files and fixed.

Emergent knows how the whole project is set up. It knows that if it changes the schema, it also needs to change the API and the display on the front end. It deals with complicated stuff that usually overwhelms founders who aren’t technical.

OpenAI wins if your job is to write creatively or ideate. But if your job needs structure, persistence, and dependability, Emergent’s specialized nature comes out on top.

Control and Personalization: Emergent vs. OpenAI

The OpenAI ecosystem is a little bit comforting. It’s a garden with walls around it. You know what you’re getting. That wall, on the other hand, works both ways. When you use ChatGPT Enterprise, you have to use their interface. You can’t change the color of the buttons. You can’t change the layout to work better for you. You rent their house, but they won’t let you paint the walls.

Emergent gives you the keys to the property. You own the asset because Emergent writes real software code. You can tell Emergent to change the “Approve” button to green if you don’t like how it looks. It will then rewrite the CSS code. If you want to give a new user role called “Auditor” the ability to see files but not delete them, all you have to do is ask, and the backend permissions will be changed.

This difference is very vital, especially for growing companies. When you work with OpenAI, you often build wrappers around their technology. You are making things with technology with Emergent. It feels less like a subscription service and more like something your company owns and can use.

The Price of Doing Business With Emergent vs. OpenAI

There is always money involved, but the pricing for these two are as different as their ideas.

OpenAI wants you to pay for “thought.” You pay for their chat interface by the token (which is about a piece of a word) or by the seat. It’s a model for consumption. You pay more the more you talk. It’s cheap to get started, but if you make a huge automated system dealing with boatloads of documents, those token costs rise very fast.

Emergent’s prices are more like paying for a service or a utility. You are basically paying for the computational time it takes to make and host your apps. You are paying for more than the words you’ve made. You are also paying for the hosting that keeps your new app online and the server that runs your database.

The value proposition changes according to what you have. OpenAI is cheap if you have a team of developers because you only pay for the raw intelligence, and your team builds on it. Emergent is a good deal if you don’t have any developers. Consider this: hiring a freelance developer to make a custom internal tool could cost you between $5,000 and $10,000. Emergent can probably make a version of that tool for a lot less money and in a lot less time. 

The Emergent vs. OpenAI Decision

So, who comes out on top? Like with most things in life, the answer is annoying: “It depends.” But let’s make it easier than that.

If you mostly need to talk to people or be creative, you should choose OpenAI. There is no better tool for getting help with writing emails, coming up with marketing ideas, or summarizing long meeting notes than this one. For the individual worker, it is the best way to get more done. It makes one person feel like ten.

If you need to make a system or a tool, you should choose Emergent. Emergent is the answer if you ever say, “I wish we had an app for this” or “I hate copying data from this spreadsheet to that database.” It’s the tool for the operator who wants to do more than just speed up writing; they want to automate processes. It lets a business owner who doesn’t know much about technology suddenly get the work of a software engineering team.

In the future of work, it’s not likely that you’ll have to choose between the two. You will probably use OpenAI to help you plan your strategy and then use Emergent to make the digital workers who carry it out. The builder makes the plan a reality, while the brain comes up with it.