Today, OpenAI announced its next step towards the future of agentic AI and AI agents. Following its big moves this month, which saw the firm collaborate with the US government on Project Stargate, OpenAI is announcing Operator, an agent AI system to help its platform users complete productivity and workplace tasks.
Operator is launching in the States today, Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, noted that Pro Users in the United States can try out the new feature immediately, “and we’ll also make it available to Plus users in the coming months. ”
According to the OpenAI leader, Operator is still in an “early research preview,” with “a lot of improvements” to come.
In a promotional social media post, Altman noted:
AI agents are AI systems that can do work for you independently. You give them a task, and they go off and do it. We think this is going to be a big trend in AI and really impact the work people can do, how productive they can be, how creative they can be, what they can accomplish.
What can the Operator Do?
Like many emerging AI agent solutions, OpenAI’s Operator system aims to drive the future of work by giving workers a smart digital tool which can help them complete specific tasks independently, based on prompts and requests.
Altman explained that Operator is a system that can use a web browser. The CEO highlighted its featured integration leveraged a cloud-based browser during the video to help with a workflow.
He explained:
Just like [how] you would use a web browser – You can look at a screen and control. An Operator can do that and control the keyboard and the mouse and do all sorts of things.
Seemingly, OpenAI is looking to scale Operator quickly, most likely reflecting the surge in interest agentic AI solutions have received recently.
“We’ll make it better, we’ll make it cheaper, we’ll make it more widely available, but we really want to put it in people’s hands,” Altman also added. Thus, accessibility for OpenAI’s agentic solution appears paramount as the firm continues to cement its lead in B2B AI solutions.
That’s not all. Operator appears to be the first of many AI agent services coming from the company, with Altamn explaining that OpenAI will “have more agents to launch in the coming weeks and months,” so 2025 truly looks to be a year of growth for the emerging technology.
Will the EU Miss this Update?
Interestingly, as part of the announcement, Altman explained that while select US users can test the solution today, other countries soon, EU regions may have to wait longer.
Altman did not give a specific reason, with the CEO remarking that “Europe will unfortunately take a while.”
The news comes after President Donald Trump highlighted a significant $500 billion joint investment called ‘Stargate,’ involving major technology companies OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank. He referred to it as a “resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential.”
The primary purpose of this investment is to build next-generation data centres equipped with advanced cooling systems and high-density server configurations specifically designed for AI workloads. These facilities will be essential for managing the substantial computational demands associated with training and operating large language models (LLMs), which necessitate much more processing power than traditional computing tasks. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison mentioned that these new data centres are already under construction in Texas.
While Project Stargate and the recent OpenAI Operator announcement have no direct link, or at least not as of yet, the US government’s multi-billion support and OpenAI’s parallel struggle to deploy Operator in the EU may reflect on the worldwide AI market’s direction in 2025.
