At the start of the year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned in his blog post that 2025 will be the year of AI Agents. Basically, Agents are AI tools that not only reply with text or generate images but carry out tasks for you.

Today, OpenAI unveiled its first AI Agent called Operator, a tool that can execute tasks and take actions for you on a web browser. For example, you can ask Operator something like “Check Butter Chicken recipe and add all the needed ingredients to my shopping cart. I already have yogurt and cinnamon sticks.” The Operator will check the recipe and add all the ingredients in your shopping cart except the ones you already have. A useful tool to carry out daily, mundane, and repetitive tasks.
Similarly, you can book flight tickets, fill out forms, check last month’s bank statement, shop online, or even cancel a purchase and apply for a refund—OpenAI’s Operator can do it all. Pretty fascinating, right? Let’s break it all down to see what Operator is, how it works, and how you can get started.
What Is OpenAI’s Operator?

Operator is OpenAI’s first AI agent that combines vision and reasoning capabilities to perform tasks on your behalf on your computer. This tech is powered by OpenAI’s Computer-Using Agent (CUA) model. Wait, what? Essentially, CUA takes screenshots to “see” what’s on the screen and then interacts with the browser by clicking, typing, and scrolling—basically mimicking what you’d do with a mouse and keyboard. It works similarly to Claude’s Computer Use and Google’s Project Mariner.
Now, here’s the catch: Operator is currently in its research preview phase, so it can only work within a virtual browser environment for now. Full OS-level control is a long-term goal – not available just yet.
Even in this early stage, Operator is showing impressive results though. In browser-based benchmarks like WebArena (a simulated web environment) and WebVoyager (tests on live websites like Amazon and Google Maps), Operator achieved success rates of 58.1% and 87%, respectively. For context, humans have a success rate of 78.2% in WebArena. Not too shabby, eh?
Not just that, OpenAI claims that the Operator is capable of learning from its mistakes and even self-correcting them. Impressive if true.

How to Use Operator Now
If you’re excited to try Operator, here’s the deal: Currently, it’s in a research preview phase and only available to Pro users in the U.S. OpenAI plans to expand access to Plus, Team, and Enterprise users in the future and eventually roll it out to a wider audience, integrating it directly into ChatGPT. However, if you’re in Europe, you’ll need to wait a bit longer.
Getting started with Operator is straightforward:
- Log in to operator.chatgpt.com using your Pro account.
- Give a prompt explaining what you want Operator to do. For example: “Find the best deals on flights to Miami and book one within my budget” or “Search for job openings in marketing and save the details in a document.”
- Operator takes over the virtual browser, performs the task, and lets you know when it’s done. It asks for your input when handling sensitive tasks like entering passwords or payment details.

You can take control any time you want using Takeover Mode. So if you feel something is off or wrong and needs to be corrected, you can stop the Operator in the middle. Need to do something daily? Create the perfect prompt and then save that prompt on the homepage to use daily.
For now, Operator is a glimpse into what’s possible when AI evolves from passive tools to active AI-powered digital assistants. Whether you’re automating repetitive tasks or exploring its limits, Operator offers a fascinating look at the future of AI. So, if you’re a Pro user in the U.S., why not give it a shot?
But at the same time, it also raises several like what happens if someone hacks in and Operator overrides human instructions, some bugs that lead to unintended actions and consequences, data (all those screenshots), and of course, privacy and security. OpenAI has listed several safety measures like watch mode, monitoring, etc. to counter them but there is always a risk. However, in the long run, convenience wins over potential risks if the upside is big. Operator can save you a lot of time that you can direct towards something more productive or creative.