(Bloomberg) — OpenAI is rolling out an artificial intelligence tool that can help book flights, plan grocery orders and even complete purchases for users, joining a growing number of tech companies betting on so-called AI agents that act on a person’s behalf. The service, called Operator, can carry out a wide range of tasks by using the internet much in the way a human would, including navigating to a website, typing and clicking buttons, OpenAI said on Thursday. Operator’s software works by combining some of OpenAI’s computer-vision features with multi-step problem-solving capabilities meant to mimic how people reason, the company said. Bloomberg News first reported on OpenAI’s plans for Operator in November. Initially, OpenAI is releasing what it calls a “research preview” of Operator online to a limited number of US customers who pay $200 per month for the recently introduced ChatGPT Pro subscription. The company said it hopes to learn from Operator’s early users so it can improve the product and plans to offer it to more paid customers over time.The Operator rollout is part of a broader industry push toward agents, or AI software that can complete multi-step tasks for users with minimal supervision. OpenAI-backer Microsoft Corp. and rival Anthropic have launched their own takes on agent software, as have a number of other startups. The companies hope such tools can save users time with their personal and professional tasks and thereby live up to the long-held promise that AI will make people more productive. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive officer, previously said agents will be “the next giant breakthrough” for AI.
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In a demonstration of the tool on Wednesday, Peter Welinder, OpenAI’s vice president of product, and Yash Kumar, who leads product and engineering for Operator, showed how the tool could look for a restaurant reservation or recognize the items on a handwritten list to prep an online grocery order. Kumar said OpenAI partnered with a number of companies on the tool, including Instacart, OpenTable, Uber and StubHub, in part to ensure Operator works well on their websites.
After Kumar prompted Operator to use OpenTable to book a table at San Francisco restaurant Beretta around 7 p.m., the tool opened a remote browser window, went to OpenTable’s website and searched for the restaurant — but couldn’t initially find it. As it turned out, OpenTable was set to search for restaurants in Iowa, not California. But Kumar had previously instructed Operator to search within a certain San Francisco zip code for relevant queries, so on its own, the tool switched to searching OpenTable in San Francisco and then shared a reservation for him to approve.
