Artificial intelligence just took a giant leap. OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent introduces a new way to get things done, letting an AI think and act on your behalf. Whether you need a report on your competitors, a dinner party planned, or a financial spreadsheet updated, ChatGPT agent can handle the workflow and deliver polished results. This post breaks down the key features of the agent, explains why it matters, and shows how it outperforms previous models, all in an easy to follow format.
What Is ChatGPT Agent?
Traditional chatbots answer questions. ChatGPT agent goes further by completing tasks from start to finish. It combines three powerful capabilities:
- Operator’s tool use, the agent can click, scroll and type on websites like a human. It can log in (after you take over for secure credentials), filter search results and download files.
- Deep research’s analysis, it can read and summarize complex information, run code and analyse data.
- ChatGPT’s reasoning, the model plans, decides which tools to use and keeps you informed through a conversation.
By unifying these strengths, ChatGPT agent can use a visual browser, a text based browser, a terminal for running code, and connectors to apps like Gmail and GitHub. It even operates inside its own virtual computer, which keeps context across multiple steps. You’re always in control: the agent asks permission before doing anything significant, and you can pause or take over whenever you like.
Real World Examples
Here are just a few things ChatGPT agent can do:
- Plan your schedule, “Look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news.”
- Prepare and purchase ingredients, “Plan and buy ingredients to make Japanese breakfast for four.”
- Analyse competitors and build slides, “Analyze three competitors and create a slide deck.”
At work, it can convert screenshots into editable presentations, rearrange meetings or update spreadsheets with new financial data. At home, it can plan travel, design dinner parties or book appointments. All of this happens within the same chat.
How Well Does It Perform?
OpenAI tested ChatGPT agent on a range of benchmarks. The results are impressive:
Humanity’s Last Exam & FrontierMath
The agent sets a new “state of the art” on Humanity’s Last Exam, a test of expert level questions. With all of its tools activated it achieves 41.6% accuracy on first try, nearly double earlier systems. For FrontierMath, a notoriously hard math benchmark, the agent reaches 27.4% accuracy when it can run code, far ahead of previous models.
Tackling Real-World Tasks
ChatGPT agent isn’t just good at math, it’s built for the kinds of jobs people do every day. On OpenAI’s internal benchmark of economically important tasks, like preparing competitive analyses, building detailed amortization schedules, or finding water wells for a new hydrogen facility, the agent’s outputs match or exceed human experts about half the time. It comfortably
Data Science & Modeling Benchmarks
OpenAI also tested the agent on DSBench, a suite of realistic data science tasks that cover both data analysis and modeling. Here, the agent shines: it scores 89.9% on data analysis tasks compared with GPT 4o’s 34.1% and even exceeds the human baseline of 64.1%. On data modeling tasks, the agent achieves 85.5%, ahead of humans (65.0%) and well above pprior models.
Spreadsheets & Financial Modeling
Spreadsheet tasks are tricky for many AI systems. In SpreadsheetBench, which uses real world spreadsheets created in Excel and LibreOffice, ChatGPT agent dramatically outperforms previous models. With direct .xlsx access, it scores 45.5% while prior GPT models range from about 16 % to 23.3% and Copilot in Excel manages 20.0%. Human testers, for context, achieve 71.3%. The agent closes much of that gap and even without special access it still hits 35.3%.
ChatGPT agent also excels at investment banking modeling tasks. On a benchmark of complex financial models, it achieves around 71.3% mean accuracy, well above deep research (48.6%) and OpenAI o3 (55.9%). These tasks include building multi statement models for Fortune 500 companies and leveraged buyout analyses.
Browsing, Research & Real World Web Tasks
Beyond spreadsheets, ChatGPT agent is a powerful researcher. On BrowseComp, a benchmark that measures how well agents find difficult information on the web, the agent reaches 68.9% accuracy, far ahead of deep research (51.5%) and OpenAI o3 (49.7%).
Its abilities extend to browsing and interacting with websites as well. On the WebArena benchmark, which evaluates agents performing real world web tasks like ordering food or booking travel, the agent scores 65.4% compared with 62.9% for the previous CUA o3 model. Humans still perform best at 78.2%, but the gap is narrowing.
Safety and Control
Letting an AI act on your behalf introduces new risks. OpenAI has built multiple safeguards into ChatGPT agent:
- Explicit confirmations, The agent asks for your permission before taking actions like making a purchase.
- Active supervision, Critical tasks such as sending emails require you to watch and approve each step.
- Risk-aware behavior, It refuses high-risk tasks (for example, bank transfers). It’s also trained to resist prompt-injection attacks, where malicious websites try to make the agent reveal private data or take unintended actions.
- Privacy controls, You can delete all browsing data and log out of active sessions with a single click. When you take over the browser, what you type remains private.
These measures give you control and reduce the chance of unintended consequences.
Availability and What’s Next
ChatGPT agent is rolling out gradually. Pro subscribers already have access, and Plus and Team plans will get it over the next few days. Enterprise and Education customers will follow in the coming weeks. Pro users receive 400 agent messages per month; other paid plans include 40 messages, with more available via credits. At launch, the service is not yet available in the European Economic Area or Switzerland.
This is just the beginning. OpenAI plans to continually improve the agent, adding new tools, refining its reasoning and making it easier to use. Slide creation is currently in beta and may produce basic layouts, but updates are already in progress. The developers are also experimenting with automatically recurring tasks, so you could schedule weekly reports or summaries.
Why This Matters for PolarPath
At PolarPath Technologies we believe in empowering organizations through automation and insightful data. The ChatGPT agent aligns perfectly with our mission, it can automate time consuming tasks, produce high quality reports and presentations, and free your team to focus on strategic thinking. As the technology evolves, we’ll be exploring ways to integrate these capabilities into our offerings and help our clients harness AI safely and ethically.
Image credits: All charts and screenshots courtesy of OpenAI.
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