OpenAI’s agentic age begins: ChatGPT Tasks provides job scheduling, reminders, and more

ChatGPT has taken a major step towards becoming a personal assistant by releasing a new feature, Tasks. This could be a sign that OpenAI plans to release more agents.

Tasks, currently in beta, allows ChatGPT Plus Team and Pro users to schedule actions ahead of the time.

If someone wants to be reminded of a project or receive daily weather updates, for example, they can ask ChatGPT. It will then notify them at the selected time and date. Tasks can either be recurring reminders or one-time ones.

To create a task, the user should select “4o with scheduled Tasks” in the model picker. Then they can write a reminder prompt. ChatGPT will also suggest tasks based on previous conversations.

Tasks are compatible with all versions ChatGPT, and can send notifications via desktop, web and mobile. The task manager is only available on the web-based version of ChatGPT.

OpenAI stated that the beta period would help its researchers “understand the way people use Tasks” and refine the feature, before making it available for all ChatGPT Users.

The Tasks feature joins other assistant-like features in ChatGPT. OpenAI launched ChatGPT screen sharing during its “12 Days of OpenAI”an event held in December. Users could open ChatGPT and ask it to help them reply while they read a text message.

OpenAI’s First Agent?

Rumors about OpenAI releasing a AI agent circulated when some users discovered ChatGPT allowing access to scheduled tasks even as early as December. The company’s first AI agent would be called Operator.

Some people believed Tasks was the precursor to Operator. X user @kimmonismus(aka “Chubby”) said: “It seems that The Information is correct and everything is prepared for the release “Operator”, i.e. OpenAI’s agent. The ‘Tasks” function discovered by Tibor appears to be the first important step in the preparation for Operator. It is unclear whether we will see a release or a preview this month.”

Testing Catalog News in X theorized tasks could enable ChatGPT to eventually search for specific information and summarise data, open websites, view documents, and think through problems.

VentureBeat reached out to OpenAI about Tasks and Operator. The company declined to answer the question and only said Tasks “will be an important step toward making ChatGPT a more helpful AI companion.”

OpenAI has already made its first foray into the agentic space with Swarm, a framework it released to help orchestrate AI agents.

Making ChatGPT an even better assistant

You probably use Reminders and Google Calendar a lot to remind yourself of important news embargoes, planned interviews, or to wish a relative a Happy Birthday.

There is a wide range of productivity, calendar, and reminder apps for consumers and businesses. Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar Asana Trello and Notion are just a few. There are many applications in the productivity assistant space that remind teams and individuals of tasks to be completed.

OpenAI’s big play in a crowded market is interesting, particularly since most people do not think of chatbots to be scheduling assistants. ChatGPT streamlines the migration of coding and writing tasks onto the platform, or the search for the web from the chat interface. ChatGPT opens up the developers’ IDE almost automatically.

As ChatGPT continues to add more actions to its platform it is becoming easier and easier to set up reminders and scheduled tasks. ChatGPT is now a viable alternative to many productivity apps.