The Den saves 10-15 hours a week with ChatGPT Work

The Den Family Social, a social club for parents in Denver, cut its leadership team's workload by 10 to 15 hours a week with ChatGPT Work while opening a second location. In a customer case study published on October 1 (local time), OpenAI said The Den now prepares grant applications in two hours instead of three days and liquor-license materials in three hours instead of four days. OpenAI put the reductions at 92% for grant applications and 91% for liquor-license applications. It is a case of a small business handing part of the administrative load of expansion to an AI agent.

The Den brings hospitality, community, work and play together in one place, aiming to give parents somewhere they can feel like themselves while their children are welcome too. It grew out of founder Chandler Lipe's own transition into parenthood and her belief that parents deserve elevated spaces designed with their wellbeing in mind. When construction and pre-opening for the second location began, administrative work piled up, and Lipe brought in ChatGPT Work to ease the load.

"ChatGPT Work allows us to build the company we need before we have the size or resources of that company," said Lipe, the CEO. The challenge was carrying the knowledge and context built up at the first location over to the second. The team connected Gmail, Slack and Google Drive plugins so ChatGPT Work could gather and analyze information from across the business and propose next steps. According to the OpenAI case study that METAL reviewed, planning became more organized and repeatable, while the team still checks the output for accuracy and makes the final decisions.

The most dramatic moment came with the second liquor-license application. When an earlier hearing slot suddenly opened up, The Den used ChatGPT Work to quickly pull documents together, identify what was missing and convert files into the required formats. "Work that would have taken four days of searching, sorting, formatting, and assembling was condensed into three hours of team review and completion with ChatGPT Work," Lipe explained. The Den uses the same workflow for time-sensitive grant opportunities, and spending less time per application means it can pursue more of them.

The uses go beyond paperwork. Leaders work through questions and refine proposals with ChatGPT before bringing problems to the group. Lipe estimates this saves her about 7 hours a week of exploratory conversations. Brooke, head of programming and partnerships, needed a more consistent approach to partnerships as the business grew, so she worked through with ChatGPT which partnerships had worked, which had failed and why, producing a proposed partnership structure for the leadership team to review. Maia, the general manager, gathered financial reports from the accountant and sales and inventory data from the point-of-sale (POS) systems into a single view of the business, which she uses to forecast inventory needs and decide how purchasing should work across both locations.

From a sociological point of view, what stands out in this case is where the time goes. The Den's customers are parents who easily lose their own time between caregiving and work, and the people running the club are themselves a small team whose time was being consumed by administration as they expanded. While traveling between locations and meetings, Lipe uses ChatGPT Voice to dictate emails for drafting, capture meeting follow-ups and organize ideas as they come. Instead of returning to her desk to work through a pile of tasks, she reviews finished drafts and sends them, changing the order of her day.

As a next step, The Den plans to use Codex to build customized systems. Candidates include a member app for check-in and class registration, better connections between its POS systems and Slack alerts linking teams across both locations. METAL has reported on how ATV Big Air Tour used ChatGPT Work to cut three days of inventory work down to three hours, and OpenAI said in this post that more than 1 million businesses around the world are achieving meaningful results with OpenAI.

OpenAI's case study presents these results in the customer's own words and does not attach separate external verification. Even so, the direction indicated by turning three days into two hours and four days into three hours is clear. As small teams handle with agents the work that large companies once handled with legal departments and back offices, the formula that equated size with administrative capacity is starting to shift. The time The Den saves ultimately flows back to the reason the club exists: expanding spaces where parents can be themselves alongside their children.