OpenAI said the tool can do your shopping and book your travel.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI is kicking off its first real attempt at an artificial intelligence (AI) agent.
The company on Thursday launched a research preview of a product called Operator, which can go to the web and perform tasks such as filling out forms, ordering groceries, booking travel, and creating memes.
For now, it is only available in the United States to users on ChatGPT’s Pro subscription plan and will not be coming to Europe anytime soon.
“[Operator] will be [in] other countries soon,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a livestream on Thursday.
“Europe will, unfortunately, take a while,” he added, without explaining why.
AI agents are designed to take autonomous actions to assist humans and do not require a human to tell them what to do, as they gather data based on user preference.
It is different from an AI chatbot such as ChatGPT, which is designed for human-like conversations and serves as more of a co-pilot in assisting humans.
Instead, Operator can use its own browser, look at a webpage, and interact with it by typing and using the functions of a computer mouse such as clicking and scrolling, OpenAI said. The company also said it can “see” through screenshots.
The AI agent is powered by Computer-Using Agent (CUA), a model combining OpenAI’s GPT-4o's vision capabilities with advanced reasoning through reinforcement learning.
OpenAI said that it will expand Operator to Plus, Team, and Enterprise subscription users and integrate these capabilities into ChatGPT in the future.
The company said that it is limited at the moment and is “still learning, evolving and may make mistakes” and currently “encounters challenges with complex interfaces like creating slideshows or managing calendars”.
OpenAI is not the first company to launch an AI agent. Microsoft, Google, and Slack have also launched their own agents.
Enterprises are tipped to have a slew of AI agents in 2025, which can help with customer service, human resources, data security, and public sector organisations. They are, in general, designed to save users time.