What is ChatGPT agent? | Zapier

I’ve been writing about AI for over a decade now, and I’d argue that the real test of AI usefulness now is whether it can take action in the real world. That’s what platforms like Zapier are after, orchestrating AI to actually get work done for you.

ChatGPT agent is a swing at the same problem. Instead of being a generative AI chatbot, it turns ChatGPT into a tool that can take initiative, trigger actions, and handle tasks on your behalf.

So, let’s take a look at ChatGPT agent, see what it’s meant to be able to do, and consider whether it manages to pull it off.

Table of contents:

What is ChatGPT agent?

ChatGPT agent is both an agentic AI model from OpenAI and the ChatGPT feature that uses that model. An agentic model is one that can work to achieve complex, multi-step goals with minimal human involvement: you tell ChatGPT agent what you want it to do, and it goes off and does it.

This includes things like planning a dinner party and adding the necessary ingredients to an Instacart cart, creating a report or slide deck based on the upcoming client calls in your calendar, or creating a spreadsheet based on a series of financial statements.

To achieve all this, ChatGPT agent is a combo of a few different tools:

• It has a virtual computer and can use a simulated mouse and keyboard to browse websites as if it were a human. It can also run terminal commands to execute code, analyze data, and generate slides and spreadsheets. (OpenAI first demoed this as a feature called Operator.)

• It can engage in reasoning and multi-step research and synthesize all the information it finds into useful reports. (This is at the core of deep research, which remains one of ChatGPT’s best features.)

• It has access to external data sources and applications through Connectors; though for now, you can only use a handful of services like Gmail, Google Drive, and GitHub. You can also upload files for it to work with.

And all this is tied together with ChatGPT‘s general intelligence and conversational abilities.

OpenAI calls ChatGPT agent a “natural evolution of Operator and deep research,” and it tracks. It isn’t so much a revolutionary leap forward as the sensible next step toward more useful and practical AI tools.

ChatGPT agent isn’t quite ready to operate fully independently. You’ll take over its browser to log in to an account or pay for stuff it’s put in your shopping cart. It will also ask you questions to clarify what you want it to do. Think of it as a collaborative agent that needs a little bit of oversight.

What can ChatGPT agent do?

ChatGPT agent is one of the most flexible tools that OpenAI has created—at least in theory. It’s impossible to detail every possible thing you can do with it, so instead, here’s a collection of the kinds of things it’s capable of (at least some of the time). This is a mix of OpenAI’s suggestions, things I’ve had it do, suggestions from other people, and suggestions from ChatGPT itself.

It’s important to note that this list is somewhat idealistic. All going well, this is the kind of thing it can do. Whether it succeeds or not depends on the specific resources it’s trying to use. As I’ll get to in a moment, ChatGPT agent can be a bit hit and miss.

So, here are the ideas:

• Research the best pocket hole jig, find a shop where it’s available in Dublin, and add it to your cart.

• Compare MacBook Pro M4 prices across Irish and UK retailers, then purchase from the cheapest option. (You’ll have to enter the card details.)

• Book a haircut at your preferred barber for next Wednesday morning. (If you give it your login details, it will log in for you.)

• Order flowers for delivery to a friend’s address on their birthday.

• Search for the top 10 houseboat services in Alleppey, Kerala, and book a two-night stay with meals included.

• Email a Sicilian dive school in Italian to arrange two shore dives with rental gear.

• Reserve a vineyard stay in Tuscany matching your budget and dates.

• Read your Gmail inbox, summarize today’s important emails, and draft replies in your tone.

• Check your Google Calendar, suggest three slots for a team meeting, and send invites.

• Pull data from multiple Google Sheets, merge into one report, and email it to your colleague.

• Compare two mortgage scenarios using your bank’s online calculator and generate a PDF report.

• Order your preferred protein powder when you’re about to run out.

• Generate AI images of your dog in different art styles and save them to your shared Google Drive folder.

• Check your calendar for upcoming client meetings, then brief you with relevant recent news.

• Plan a Japanese breakfast for four, buy all the necessary ingredients, and give you a timeline for every step of the recipe.

• Research three competitors, then create a polished slide deck with the findings.

• Update a financial model with projections and formulas, then summarize the key assumptions.

• Gather data on seven global transit systems and benchmark them against Chicago in a summary report.

• Review your calendar for client calls, then prepare a report and slide deck on strategy changes.

If you want to go beyond one-off tasks like this, you’re better off using Zapier Agents. Zapier Agents are built for business automation. They’re custom AI teammates that integrate directly with 8,000+ apps, allowing them to run complex workflows across tools without constant supervision. Designed to scale across teams, they’re best for repeatable processes like lead management, onboarding, or data syncing—things that go beyond a single task and need reliability at scale.

Is ChatGPT agent any good?

ChatGPT agent swaps between moments of excellence and moments of sheer incompetence. I’ve been both incredibly impressed and utterly baffled by what it can do. Here’s one example.

ChatGPT agent was able to take a screenshot of a workout plan and turn it into a spreadsheet with columns for things like the type of workout, how many rounds it was, how long it was, and so on. For some of the information, ChatGPT agent had to be proactive: not every workout listed the length, so it would have to calculate it from the number of rounds and the length of the work and rest period. It did a great job and uploaded it to my Google Drive for me. Huge win.

Except I then asked it for the Google Drive share link. It took 22 minutes, and failed to find the file it had just uploaded.

On the other hand, it pulled off other hard tasks really well. It found me a local barber with availability next Friday morning and navigated its way through the booking system. I had to take control and add a credit card, but it then made the booking.

But then, it couldn’t use Amazon.ie because it’s a robot so it got blocked.

It’s this inconsistency that’s ChatGPT agent’s most annoying problem. If you could reliably predict what it was capable of, you’d be able to make decisions about when to use it and when not to, but even after a lot of testing, I still can’t predict what task it’s going to find easy and what it’s going to fail at.

Also, ChatGPT agent can be very slow. If you want a quick answer, you’re better off doing the research yourself. It’ll also sometimes stop and require your input. If you’re not paying attention, you might not realize that you need to log in to something or solve a CAPTCHA or the like. These are small nitpicks, but it’s worth having realistic expectations.

For now, ChatGPT agent is a super interesting tool that can handle some tasks, shows a lot of promise for dealing with drudge work, and probably shouldn’t be left completely unsupervised.

How to try ChatGPT agent

ChatGPT agent is available on the $20/month ChatGPT Plus plan. There are some usage limits, and the $200/month Pro plan provides more access.

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