OpenAI is launching an AI agent that can do work for people

OpenAI is on to the next wave of artificial intelligence with an autonomous agent it reportedly plans to launch in January.

The AI agent, codenamed “Operator,” can do tasks on behalf of a person, including coding and booking travel, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

The startup plans to release the AI agent as a research preview and through its application programming interface (API), OpenAI leaders reportedly told staff in a meeting Wednesday.

OpenAI is working on other AI-agent-related projects, including a tool that can perform tasks in a web browser, people told Bloomberg. That tool is reportedly close to completion.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The startup’s investor and partner, Microsoft (MSFT+0.52%), announced in October that its Copilot AI users could build their own autonomous agents in Copilot Studio starting this month. The autonomous agents can “understand the nature of your work and act on your behalf,” Microsoft said.

In July, Nvidia (NVDA-1.18%) CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed a future where everyone has an AI assistant.

“Every single restaurant, every single website will probably, in the future, have these AIs,” Huang said about Meta’s AI Studio platform, which allows users and creators to generate AI characters of themselves that can assist with different tasks.

Zuckerberg added, “Just like every business has an email address and a website and a social media account, I think, in the future, every business is going to have an AI.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI launched ChatGPT’s ability to search the web in October. ChatGPT search provides links to relevant web sources in its responses, “which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for,” OpenAI said. With web search on ChatGPT, users can ask questions “in a more natural, conversational way.”