ChatGPT’s Agent feature lets you assign tasks and walk away – here’s how it works

If you are a ChatGPT Plus or Pro subscriber then you get access to one of ChatGPT’s most powerful features – ChatGPT Agent. As its name suggests, Agent is an agentic AI, which means it can be given tasks to complete in the background while you are free to go off and do something else.

ChatGPT's latest addition, Shopping Research, is actually a type of agent.

Using Agent is a very different way of using ChatGPT compared to its normal chatbot function. There’s no back-and-forth conversation going on with a witty AI. You simply give Agent a task, and it performs it in the background, only coming back to you once it has completed it.

One of the main uses for agents is as research tools for complex topics, but they can also be used for taking simple human-like actions. So, you could ask ChatGPT Agent to do something you would normally need to do yourself or ask an assistant to do, like look for flights to New York, and it would search the web for you, finding the best flight based on the criteria you supply, like dates, cost, and your preference for time. It would visit all the same websites that a human assistant would if given the same task, but it’s a lot quicker.

Using ChatGPT Agent for finding plane tickets is actually a pretty good use case for it, and something I’ve done a few times with good results. In theory, an agentic AI should be able to book the flights for you as well, although I’ve found that it's rare for any AI to be able to circumvent all the blocks that companies put in place to stop bots from booking things without some form of human intervention. Anyway, I’m not sure I would want ChatGPT to actually spend my money without at least checking in with me first.

Vibe coding

Something else Agent can do is to write code and create an app for you. You don’t need to know anything about coding yourself; you can simply ask ChatGPT Agent to create a specific app to perform a task you need done, and it will go away and write the code, create the app, and then tell you when it’s done.

This type of coding, called ‘Vibe coding’, is pretty popular these days because AI is very good at it.

Slideshows and spreadsheets

Another good use for ChatGPT Agent is for creating presentations or spreadsheets. ChatGPT Agent can make a great PowerPoint presentation by searching the web for information on the topic you’ve asked it to make the presentation on. Equally, you can ask it to create an Excel spreadsheet based on figures it can find online, and it will produce it for you, formatted exactly as you require.

The final thing to remember when using ChatGPT Agent is that you’ll need to get used to how long it takes. We’re pretty much used to everything happening instantaneously on computers, but Agent really needs some time to go away and complete the task you’ve allocated it, so it’s not worth using ChatGPT Agent for any simple questions you have – leave those to ChatGPT’s normal chatbot mode.

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