ChatGPT’s new agent can now handle complex tasks autonomously, marking a significant leap towards AI-driven productivity assistants.
OpenAI has taken another leap ahead in AI innovation by unveiling its highly anticipated ChatGPT Agent. And it’s available to Pro, Plus, and Team subscribers. This new capability allows ChatGPT to not only assist with conversational queries but also autonomously perform a variety of tasks, such as making data-backed creative presentations, summarising your emails for the day, and more.
Yash Kumar, product lead at OpenAI, in an interview with The Verge, mentioned Agent’s extensive capabilities,
“ChatGPT Agent has access to ‘an entire computer' instead of just a browser; they’ve enhanced the toolset quite a bit…”
A Unified AI System
The ChatGPT Agent integrates several revolutionary technologies into a single cohesive unit. It combines the web-interaction abilities of the Operator, the information synthesis powers of Deep Research, and the conversational intelligence of ChatGPT. This fusion enables the agent to act on tasks, marking a significant step away from the AI’s previous role as a mere question-answering tool.
According to OpenAI, users can now engage ChatGPT Agent to handle real-world activities such as
“planning and buying ingredients to make a Japanese breakfast for four” or “analyzing three competitors and creating a slide deck.”
The AI doesn’t just assist but takes full responsibility for the task, from researching ingredients to executing the necessary purchases, or from gathering competitor data to generating a professional report.
How ChatGPT Agent Works
The AI operates through a virtual computer that it controls, which helps it in shifting between reasoning and action. For example, you can ask ChatGPT Agent, “look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news,” and the system will automatically navigate through the web, gather relevant information, and create a summary.
This groundbreaking capability sets ChatGPT apart from earlier AI systems, which were often limited by their inability to perform multiple, interconnected actions in a single workflow. Although there are questions about ChatGPT Agent’s speed and latency in performing these advanced tasks. To which, Yash Kumar and Isa Fulford from Open AI mentioned,
“...team is more focused on “optimizing for hard tasks…Even if it takes 15 minutes, half an hour, it’s quite a big speed-up compared to how long it would take you to do it.”
Moreover, ChatGPT Agent's elevated capabilities are demonstrated through state-of-the-art performance on key evaluations. With a pass\@1 SOTA score of 41.6 on Humanity's Last Exam and 27.4% accuracy on FrontierMath, it outperforms previous models, marking a major leap in task automation and business efficiency. These scores highlight its potential to redefine AI productivity.
OpenAI has implemented safeguards to ensure user control. For instance, certain tasks like sending emails still require oversight, and high-risk activities, such as making bank transfers, are explicitly prohibited. The model also has limited access to data, ensuring that user privacy remains intact.
What This Means for Users
ChatGPT’s new agent mode, available to Pro, Plus, and Team users, transforms AI into an active productivity partner. Instead of just answering questions, it autonomously handles tasks like scheduling, research, and purchases. This shift allows users to focus on more strategic work while saving time, marking the start of an era where AI drives real-world actions, not just conversations.
