What is OpenAI ChatGPT Agent and How to Use It

TL;DR

What is ChatGPT Agent? It’s an AI-powered assistant from OpenAI that can autonomously complete digital tasks like browsing, coding, filling forms, and creating files.

How to Use It: Available to Pro, Plus, and Team users—activate via Tools > Agent Mode or by typing /agent in ChatGPT.

Beginner to Pro Tasks: Start with calendar summaries or email overviews, then scale to complex automations like generating competitor analysis slide decks.

Visual Feedback & Control: See the agent’s real-time actions, interrupt anytime, and take over for sensitive tasks like logins or financial transactions.

Security & Performance: Features include real-time monitoring, prompt injection defense, and top-tier benchmark scores—though some tools like memory are disabled for safety (for now).

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Introduction

AI technology has made huge strides, evolving from simple chatbots to intelligent agents capable of autonomously handling complex digital workflows. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent is the latest breakthrough in this space—combining reasoning, browsing, coding, and file handling to perform real-world tasks with minimal input. As more teams explore integrating such capabilities into their own tools or platforms, the rise of AI agent development services reflects a growing demand for tailored, domain-specific automation. In this beginner-to-pro guide, you’ll discover how to start using ChatGPT Agent effectively and where this technology is headed next.

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What is the OpenAI ChatGPT Agent?

ChatGPT Agent is an advanced AI assistant designed by OpenAI to handle tasks traditionally requiring significant human interaction. It combines the intuitive conversational abilities of ChatGPT with robust tools from previous products like Operator and Deep Research.

Key functionalities include:

• Navigating and interacting with websites
  
• Filling out online forms
  
• Running and executing code
  
• Creating editable presentations and spreadsheets
  
• Integrating seamlessly with apps like Gmail, GitHub, and Google Drive

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Also Read: What Is an AI Agent?

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How to access Chatgpt Agent

If you’re subscribed to ChatGPT Pro, Plus, or Team, here’s how you can activate it:

1. Log in to your ChatGPT account.
   
2. Click on the Tools menu.
   
3. Select Agent Mode or simply type /agent into the prompt bar.

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Read More: ChatGPT 4o Plus vs. Pro: Which Plan Suits Your Needs?

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Once activated, ChatGPT Agent accesses:

• A visual browser (interactive web interface)
  
• A text-based browser (quick data retrieval)
  
• Terminal for executing code
  
• API connectors for integration with external applications

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Beginner Tasks to Try First: Step-by-Step Walkthrough

As a beginner, it’s best to start with simple, clear tasks. Let’s take two practical examples and explain exactly how the ChatGPT Agent would complete them for you.

Example: Summarizing Your Weekly Meetings

Let’s say you want to quickly get an overview of your upcoming meetings and any important news relevant to your clients.

Prompt Example:

Summarize my meetings this week based on my Google Calendar and recent news about my clients.

Here’s what happens next:

Step 1: Agent Setup

• Virtual Environment Initialization:
  The agent first sets up its virtual desktop environment (within seconds). It checks for connected tools like Google Calendar and any news sources accessible via APIs or web browsers.

Step 2: Connecting to Your Calendar

• API Interaction:
  It securely accesses your Google Calendar (with your prior permission), retrieves scheduled meetings, and organizes this information by date, time, and attendees.

Step 3: Web Browsing for Recent News

• Text-Based Browser Usage:
  The agent then scans news articles about your scheduled meeting attendees or their companies, identifying recent headlines and significant developments.

Step 4: Generating the Summary

• Synthesizing Information:
  Using its built-in intelligence, the agent summarizes meeting details and relevant recent news into an easily readable summary format.

Dynamic Task Management: Interrupt, Modify, and Expand

ChatGPT Agent is built for flexible interaction, empowering you to dynamically manage tasks. If a new requirement emerges mid-task, you can easily interrupt and provide additional instructions. For example, while using the agent to plan a wedding, you might suddenly recall needing matching shoes. Simply instruct, “Also find black dress shoes, size 9.5.” The agent immediately incorporates your new request without restarting, adapting smoothly and efficiently continuing from where it left off. This capability makes the agent truly collaborative and responsive to your evolving needs.

Visual Feedback: Understanding the Agent’s Actions

For every task, ChatGPT Agent provides a live visual screen and clearly displays its “chain-of-thought”:

• You can see the websites it visits.
  
• Observe which items it selects or compares.
  
• Read brief explanations on-screen of its logic (“Confirming calendar events,” “Checking latest client news”).

Example Output You Might Receive:

Meeting Summary (Oct 20–26, 2025):

• Monday, 2 PM: Meeting with XYZ Corp. (Discuss quarterly earnings; recent headline: XYZ Corp reports 15% revenue growth in Q3 2025.)
  
• Wednesday, 11 AM: Project Review with ABC Ltd. (Discuss project timelines; ABC Ltd. announces new software update that impacts timelines.)
  
• Friday, 4 PM: Team Sync-up (Weekly review; no news updates.)

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Pro-Level Automations: Complex Task Handling

Once you’re comfortable with beginner tasks, ChatGPT Agent truly shines when handling complex, multi-step workflows—especially in professional settings.

Imagine you’re a product manager preparing for a quarterly review. You simply prompt:

“Analyze our three main competitors based on their latest product updates, and create a slide deck summarizing strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning.”

Here’s how the agent handles this sophisticated task:

1. Research: It visits competitors’ websites, news sources, and social channels to collect relevant information.
   
2. Analysis: Using deep reasoning, it identifies trends, compares features, and synthesizes key takeaways.
   
3. Artifact Creation: It builds an editable PowerPoint deck with structured slides—charts, bullet points, and visuals—ready for presentation.

You don’t need to micromanage the process. The agent moves fluidly between its virtual browser, APIs, and terminal to gather data, process it, and generate professional-grade output—all based on your single instruction.

Other examples of pro-level automations include:

• Updating spreadsheets with live financial data.
  
• Planning multi-day offsite events including travel and meals.
  
• Generating legal-style summaries or market research reports.

These are not just time-savers—they redefine productivity for modern knowledge workers.

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Complete Capabilities Overview

ChatGPT Agent is far more than a web-browsing assistant—it’s an orchestrator of tools that mimics how a human would use a computer. Here’s a breakdown of its key capabilities:

Visual and Text-Based Browsers
For navigating and scraping websites—whether to click buttons, scroll through content, or extract structured data.

Terminal Access
Used for running code, performing calculations, or manipulating downloaded files (e.g., CSV, Excel, JSON).

Connectors Integration
Lets you link apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, GitHub, SharePoint, etc. The agent can then act on your behalf (e.g., summarizing unread emails or syncing project updates from GitHub).

File Creation & Editing
It can create .pptx and .xlsx files and edit them—adding charts, adjusting formatting, and preserving structures across tasks.

Multi-Modal Workflow Execution
For example, it can:

• Use a text browser to find structured data,
  
• Download it,
  
• Run Python code in the terminal to clean or analyze it,
  
• And finally generate a downloadable report.

Replay & Visibility
You can visually monitor the agent’s progress as it browses, clicks, filters, or loads data, with clear, ongoing narration about what it’s doing and why.

These features turn ChatGPT Agent into a robust personal assistant that can perform research, automate knowledge work, and create production-ready assets—all without switching tabs or tools.

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You’re Always in Control: Interrupt and Take Over

Despite its power, ChatGPT Agent is designed with user agency and safety at its core.

At any point during a task, you can:

• Interrupt: Pause the task and give new instructions or steer it in a different direction.
  
• Modify: Add additional goals (e.g., “Also generate a competitor comparison chart”).
  
• Take Over: For sensitive steps like logging into a website or submitting a form, the agent asks you to “take over” the browser interface.

Example: Booking a Meeting Room via an Internal Tool
Suppose the agent is finalizing an internal offsite plan. When it reaches the company’s booking portal, it will say:

“Please take over to log in securely and confirm the reservation.”

After you log in and confirm, the agent resumes from where it left off, continuing with venue confirmations or travel planning.

Security Layers Include:

• Prompt injection protection (against malicious web scripts)
  
• Watch Mode for critical actions (e.g., purchases, financial steps)
  
• No memory during agent sessions (to prevent data exfiltration)
  
• Cookie and session controls (you can delete data with one click)

You remain the final decision-maker. This balance between autonomy and oversight is what makes ChatGPT Agent trustworthy for real-world use—especially in enterprise or high-stakes scenarios.

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Security and Privacy Safeguards: How Safe Is ChatGPT Agent to Use?

With great power comes great responsibility—and OpenAI has engineered ChatGPT Agent with robust security measures to ensure it’s safe, even when performing high-stakes, real-world tasks. Here’s how it protects users at every step:

Real-Time Security Monitoring

ChatGPT Agent constantly monitors for threats such as:

• Phishing attempts
  
• Malicious code injections
  
• Suspicious web behavior

Example: Attempting a Financial Task

Suppose you’re using ChatGPT Agent to:

“Log in to my expense portal and submit this month’s receipts.”

As the agent prepares to access a financial website and handle potentially sensitive data, the security system kicks in behind the scenes:

• It flags the domain as high-risk (e.g., related to financial transactions).
  
• The agent prompts you to take over the browser to handle login securely.
  
• If the agent encounters suspicious instructions hidden in the page (e.g., in metadata or invisible elements), the classifier can detect that it might be a prompt injection attack.

Watch Mode for High-Risk Tasks

For tasks involving financial actions, email sending, or personal data access, Watch Mode kicks in. This means:

• The user must stay on the screen while the task runs.
  
• If you click away or switch tabs, the agent pauses the action.
  
• It ensures that you retain full control over critical steps, like confirming a purchase or logging into a bank portal.

Prompt Injection Defense

One major risk in agent-based systems is prompt injection, where malicious instructions are hidden on web pages to manipulate the agent. ChatGPT Agent has been:

• Specifically trained to detect and ignore these attacks.
  
• Hardened against invisible inputs and manipulative metadata.
  
• Designed to always ask for explicit user confirmation before taking consequential actions.

Privacy by Design

You’re in charge of your data. ChatGPT Agent includes:

• A single-click option to delete all browsing history and web sessions.
  
• Built-in safeguards to prevent the model from storing sensitive inputs like passwords during “takeover” browser sessions.

Cookies are managed per site, just like a standard browser, but you can clear them any time for a clean slate.

No Memory During Agent Mode

To reduce risk, ChatGPT Agent does not use memory during agent sessions. This means:

• It won’t recall past conversations or store contextual data across sessions.
  
• Prevents attackers from attempting to use prompt injection to exfiltrate stored personal info.

Memory may return in the future, but only after OpenAI confirms its safety with agents.

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Benchmark Performance: How Smart Is ChatGPT Agent?

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent isn’t just feature-rich—it’s also exceptionally intelligent. Backed by a powerful new model trained to handle complex, real-world tasks, the agent has set new standards across several industry-leading benchmarks. Here’s a breakdown of how it performs:

Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE)

This benchmark tests expert-level knowledge across over 100 subjects.

• ChatGPT Agent scored 41.6% accuracy (pass@1)
  That’s double the performance of OpenAI’s previous models (o3 and o4-mini), showcasing how well the agent can understand and reason through difficult, multi-domain queries.

FrontierMath

One of the most challenging math benchmarks, featuring problems that even professionals struggle with.

• ChatGPT Agent scored 27.4% when using tools like a terminal.
  This makes it the best-performing model yet—handling advanced math tasks with high-level accuracy and code execution.

SpreadsheetBench

Tests the model’s ability to handle real-world spreadsheet tasks like editing, formatting, and data modeling.

• ChatGPT Agent scored 45.5%, significantly higher than Copilot in Excel (20.0%) and GPT-4o (18.4%).
  It also supports .XLSX file handling, allowing the agent to modify spreadsheets directly with precision.

BrowseComp & WebArena

These benchmarks evaluate web-browsing agents on their ability to navigate real websites and complete tasks accurately.

• BrowseComp: ChatGPT Agent reached 68.9%, outperforming Deep Research (51.5%) and earlier OpenAI models.
  
• WebArena: Scored 65.4%, showing near-human performance in executing complex web tasks, like finding rare information or booking appointments online.

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Known Limitations and Future Enhancements

• Slower task execution: Complex tasks may take 10–30 minutes to complete.
  
• Slide generation in beta: Output may lack polish or perfect formatting.
  
• Memory disabled (for now): Temporarily turned off for security, especially against prompt injection.
  
• Limited availability: Currently rolling out to Pro, Plus, and Team users; not yet available in EEA and Switzerland.

Coming Soon:

• Faster performance and task execution
  
• Enhanced slideshow formatting and design
  
• Secure memory integration for better personalization
  
• Broader rollout to more user tiers and regions

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Conclusion

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent marks a major leap in AI-powered productivity, offering users the ability to delegate digital tasks—from scheduling and research to file creation and automation—with just a prompt. Whether you’re looking to streamline your personal workflow or explore how agent-based systems could support your team or product, this technology opens up a new world of possibilities.

If you’re considering building your own custom AI agent or exploring how this technology could fit into your business, you can explore AI agent development services and even book a free 30-minute consultation to get expert guidance tailored to your goals.

The future of work is agentic—and now’s the time to get ahead.

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