OpenAI's dots: An Always-On Assistant That Tries to Think Ahead

OpenAI released its always-on personal assistant, dots, at its developer day in late September, joining a push into proactive AI agents that keep working in the background without being prompted. The product is available in the ChatGPT desktop and mobile apps to Pro-tier subscribers and above, with plans starting at $100 a month.

Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI's enterprise product team, told TechCrunch Disrupt that much of dots' functionality could already be achieved with the company's Codex coding app, but that approach requires more hand-holding. The goal, he said, was to make the technology feel intuitive by framing it as a single entity in one ongoing conversation.

The assistant connects to your calendar, email, computer and other tools to help get work done. In testing, its ability to think ahead proved useful but imperfect: it flags calendar conflicts and deadlines, though not always in a timely fashion. Embiricos recalled an early version warning him about a conflict just three minutes before it began.

dots also runs what Embiricos calls proactive research, periodically reviewing what it knows about a user and proposing ways to be more helpful. On privacy, OpenAI says the agent has the same controls as ChatGPT, including the ability to turn off model training, though Embiricos acknowledged the controls aren't yet granular and said the company needs to build out much finer ones.

Whether personal AI agents can scale remains an open question. Embiricos said he still has a human assistant because corporate partners want to interact with a person, and that he never intends to meet with someone else's agent. He added that OpenAI is in deep conversations with payment processors about letting agents work with the wider ecosystem.