ChatGPT’s New Tasks Feature Signals OpenAI’s Move Toward AI Agents

OpenAI began rolling out a new feature on ChatGPT Tuesday that allows users to schedule reminders and actions for the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Dubbed Tasks, the new feature is currently being offered to all paid subscribers of the AI platform and the company has revealed plans to roll it out to the free tier later this year. The feature also appears to be OpenAI's first step towards bringing agentic capabilities of AI models to its popular chatbot.

OpenAI Rolls Out Tasks Feature for ChatGPT

In a series of posts on X (formerly known as Twitter), OpenAI announced Tasks, currently available in beta to ChatGPT Plus, Teams, and Pro users. The feature is planned to be expanded to those on the free tier of the AI chatbot later this year. Currently, the Tasks page can only be accessed via the web version of the platform.

The company said that it intends to use the beta period to better understand how people use the feature and to refine it before it is rolled out to users on the free tier. Additionally, users cannot use the Advanced Voice Mode to set tasks.

Tasks manager page in ChatGPT web
Photo Credit: OpenAI

Tasks is essentially a scheduling feature. Users can go to ChatGPT web and either type a prompt in the text field or go to the Tasks page via the profile menu to set a new task. These tasks can be reminders set as one-time on a specific date and time or recurring. Users can also tell the chatbot to perform a task at the scheduled time.

This feature can be used to get a daily news summary in the morning or a motivational message right before workout time. Since prompts can be used to set up Tasks, users can simply type a natural language message such as “Send me a summary of the biggest technology news of the day at 7:30pm on weekdays,” and it will set up the schedule.

While the scheduling part of the feature is not that groundbreaking (every smartphone clock app allows users to set up reminders), it is the “performing action” at a future time, which is quite interesting. While this is technically not an agentic function as no action is being taken outside the chatbot platform, it still requires the AI to use memory and multi-step execution to generate text or image at a given time. These capabilities in combination are typically associated with AI agents.

OpenAI has been rumoured to be working on its first AI agent, dubbed Operator, for quite some time, and it is possible that Tasks is the first step towards that goal.