Open AI, a leading AI company, announced its newest AI technology: Operators. An Operator is “an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you.”

In short, an Operator is an online personal assistant. It is an updated version of the ChatGPT chatbot. Operator is programmed to complete tasks such as booking reservations, ordering food, planning vacations, filling out forms, etc. It can be personalized by asking the user follow-up questions.

Currently, it is only available for subscribers of ChatGPT Pro, but Open AI plans to extend the option to its “Plus” and “Team and Enterprise" users later on. This advance in technology is predicted to eventually eliminate the need for human personal assistants. “300 million jobs could be lost to AI,” said Josh Howarth, a writer for Exploding Topics, a company that discovers and analyzes statistics on a variety of topics.

The Operator will be in direct competition with the Amazon-backed Anthropic “Claude” chatbot. Anthropic is another AI brand owned by ex-Open AI researchers. Their Claude chatbot is similar to the Operators but not quite as technologically advanced yet.

Some limitations of the Operator is the task completion process has been reported to be taking longer than it would if done manually. It also has not figured out how to use complex platforms like calendars. In addition, it is restricted to certain tasks and can only do a certain number of tasks per day at this point in time.

Open AI’s Operator can be used in daily life but is also marketed toward businesses. “I think business people will start leveraging AI agents to help them with all kinds of tasks over the next couple of years. I think if you want to succeed in the future then you should adopt AI and leverage it to help augment and accelerate your unique gifts. AI's capabilities are increasing at a rapid rate, and it will replace many jobs in the future... Those who choose to adopt it will benefit the most,” said Brian Anderson, CEO of Augusto Digital, a software development company.

In the next couple of decades, AI will continue to evolve rapidly. Operators are just the beginning of a technological advancement era.