Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETNot too long ago, I wrote that AI agents were the future of AI: tools that could carry out tasks for you, like ordering groceries or booking meetings. OpenAI’s latest launch makes that reality appear a bit closer. Also: AI agents will change work and society in internet-sized ways, says AWS VPOn Thursday, during a live stream, OpenAI launched a ChatGPT agent, which the company claims can handle complex tasks for you from start to finish. Some examples OpenAI provided were looking at your calendar and writing a briefing based on your upcoming events, or even planning and buying ingredients for a meal you were thinking of cooking. Let’s dive in. How it worksOpenAI’s most cutting-edge features, including Operator and deep research, gave the public a taste of the company’s agentic capabilities and now power this new agent mode. Operator, which launched in January, was created to interact directly with a web browser to carry out actions for you, while deep research is an agentic feature that can search the web for you and compose a detailed report in minutes that would otherwise take humans hours.After noticing that many of the queries being fed to Operator were a better fit for Deep Research, OpenAI decided to combine the two in this new experience — and add a few new tools.Also: Microsoft is saving millions with AI and laying off thousands – where do we go from here?For starters, the ChatGPT agent uses a visual browser that interacts with the web through a graphical user interface (GUI), a text-based browser, a terminal, and direct API access, according to the blog post. It also uses ChatGPT connectors, a feature that allows users to connect apps like Gmail and GitHub to ChatGPT so it can pull relevant information to fulfill their requests. With all of those different sources of information, ChatGPT is able to reason through which is the best for the task at hand and pull information accordingly. This processing is done using its own virtual computer and distinguishes between reasoning and action based on human instruction, which allows it to retain context while pulling from multiple tools. More