Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI to Join the AI Agent Battle in January With the Release of ‘Operator’

By Sasha Semjonova

With talks of an infamous ‘AI battle’ on the horizon, OpenAI are now reportedly making a move to position themselves at the forefront of the race with a brand new tool.

Enter ‘Operator’: OpenAI’s own AI agent which is set to be launched in January 2025. Let’s take a look at what we know.

OpenAI’s Operator 

In a staff meeting earlier this month, OpenAI revealed plans to release their own AI agent ‘Operator’ early next year as a research preview and through the company’s application programming interface for developers in January. 

Operator’s proposed abilities are already creating quite a stir; OpenAI announced that the agent can use a computer to take actions on a person’s behalf – such as writing code or booking travel – according to a couple of people close to the project. 

This will enable Operator to operate independently and have the autonomy to perform tasks on computers, simplifying workflows across various platforms.

Why Now?

The talk and subsequent release of Operator comes at a critical time. As we’ve seen with the release of Microsoft’s and Salesforce’s own agent platforms, there is evidently a real push to create the next big agentic tool.

READ MORE: Salesforce vs. Microsoft vs. ServiceNow: The Battle of the AI Agents

With key players like Salesforce, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Anthropic, and Google all making their own waves in this space, it makes sense for the organization that arguably kick-started the AI revolution with ChatGPT to find their own place within it.

Bloomberg reported that OpenAI has been working on “several” agent-related research projects, with the one closest to completion being a “general purpose tool that executes tasks in a web browser.” 

Of course, it’s too early to understand just how powerful Operator may be, but it was Roman Huet who said that an agentic future was on the horizon at this year’s TrailblazerDX. 

READ MORE: The Future of Salesforce Development in the AI Era

Six months later, Agentforce was released, so who knows what the future could look like from here.

What Does This Mean for Salesforce?

The pressure is predicted to be taken up a notch with the release of OpenAI’s Operator. Salesforce – a key force in this AI battle – will likely be quick to assess how this tool will compare to Agentforce. 

However, until we understand more about what Operator is capable of, we can only wait for more news; Agentforce is strong, but how will it compete?

Summary

The news of OpenAI’s very own agent is an interesting development in the progress of the AI race we are currently witnessing, and we can be sure that its release will be a further catalyst for how aggressive of a battle this can be. 

However, until its release, we can only speculate as to how things will change, but with a player as strong as OpenAI, it’s safe to say that a market disturbance is quite possibly on the horizon. 

The Author

Sasha Semjonova

Sasha is the Video Production Manager and a Salesforce Reporter at Salesforce Ben.

Comments:

    Richard Clark
    November 25, 2024 10:53 am
    I can't see this being bad for Agentforce, Operator looks like it will work cross applications and that's a good thing, it's not going to be able to understand what's inside Salesforce or other apps to help with automating actions there. I think RPA and test automation tools are more likely to be at risk unless they can integrate Operator as part of their suite.

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