OpenAI Unleashes ChatGPT Agent to Be Your Personal Assistant

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Agent for Pro, Plus and Team users. It’s an AI-powered personal assistant that connects to your various services online to help complete tasks for you, the company said in a livestream Thursday.

Using the power of OpenAI’s “reasoning” o3 model, which has deep research capabilities, along with Operator, ChatGPT Agent can go step-by-step from one task to the other to put together complex reports. ChatGPT Agent can visualize what it’s doing via a virtual computer interface. There, you can see its train of thought, what it’s browsing on the net and what systems it’s connecting to. 

During the livestream, OpenAI members demoed what it would be like to use ChatGPT Agent to figure out travel plans for a wedding. The tool was able to check the wedding site provided, find the date, find nearby hotels, check out what the weather might be like, browse other websites, look for tuxedos on a Nordstrom web page, look for wedding gifts, and present a final report. The user could also interject to ask for help in finding a pair of men’s black shoes. 

ChatGPT Agent can connect to various services, like your email, calendar, news apps and others. OpenAI says safety is foundational to this model and that ChatGPT Agent will request your permission before doing anything sensitive, like making purchases or submitting forms. ChatGPT agent won’t perform “high-risk tasks” like engaging in financial transactions or dealing with legal advice. The system will also reject “harmful or illegal requests,” OpenAI said.

The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The debut of ChatGPT Agent is the next step in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. These are AI models that would be so advanced they’d have a general understanding of the world around them and could outcompete humans in tasks. AI systems now, while seeming smart, actually have no understanding of the world and simply arrange words mathematically in a manner that best mimics human speech, based on certain criteria. Agentic AI systems, ones that can go out and perform complex tasks across various systems, have been seen as a major step toward achieving AGI.

Because agentic AI can better mimic complex human trains of thought, these systems can be given a task and sent off to get it accomplished. Though it’s hard to measure the economic impact of billions of AI agents doing the work once done by humans, entire industries will be affected.