OpenAI's Agent launched today

Stop the clocks. The market has moved once more: OpenAI launched their 'Agent' offering today, blending (in their words) their Operator capability along with their Deep Research features.

It feels like almost every vendor out there has some kind of agent or 'agentic' capability – but this one, OpenAI Agent – is now the yard stick, simply because of the company's dominant position in the market and mindshare.

So I think it's worthwhile taking a moment to investigate what they've created. If your time allows, I think it's always instructive to watch their live launch videos. Yes, there is a slight degree of nervousness from some of the OpenAI participants, but I think that brings a valuable authenticity to the proceedings.

It's 25 minutes helmed by Sam Altman himself – and the use cases they choose are pretty instructive, giving you an idea of the combined potential of Agent:

Or, if you just need an ultra quick overview, here's the 46-second promo video:

Finally, you can find the detailed announcement post right here.

On first glance, it looks brilliant. We'll all need to get playing with this to see how useful this is in practice, but watching the examples they show during the live stream, you can easily see how so many individuals close to companies such as OpenAI are getting so excited (or scared) by the technology.

I still find it amazing that 'computers' are able to take natural language instructions from humans and convert that into valuable actions. For example, witness the simple example where the team asked Agent to create a simple slide in Google Slides with some data from Google Drive. Fast forward another year of exponential growth and this technology is going to be ridiculously, incredibly capable.

As for availability:

ChatGPT agent starts rolling out today to Pro, Plus, and Team; Pro will get access by the end of day, while Plus and Team users will get access over the next few days. Enterprise and Education users will get access in the coming weeks. Pro users have 400 messages per month, while other paid users get 40 messages monthly, with additional usage available via flexible credit-based options.

Time to get testing!