OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Tasks to automate everyday processes

Paying customers of OpenAI's ChatGPT can now instruct the AI assistant to schedule reminders or recurrent requests. This week, ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro members worldwide will begin to receive the new beta feature known as tasks.

Users can utilise ChatGPT to set simple reminders, such as "Remind me when my passport expires in six months," and the AI assistant will send a push message to whatever platform you have tasks enabled on. Users can now make recurrent requests to ChatGPT, such as "Every Friday, give me a weekend plan based on my location and the weather forecast," or "Give me a news briefing every day at 7 a.m."

The new task function looks to be OpenAI's first foray into AI models that can behave autonomously, also known as AI agents. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, AI agents will "join the workforce" this year, making 2025 a key year for them. Tasks is a rather basic version of an agentic system, but it does allow users to make reminders with ChatGPT, a useful feature that most people have grown to anticipate from assistants like Siri and Alexa. Scheduled information queries are more unique, demonstrating new skills that prior digital assistants did not have.

By choosing "4o with scheduled tasks" from a dropdown menu in ChatGPT, users can access tasks. They can then message ChatGPT to instruct the AI assistant on what action or reminder they would like to create.

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT may recommend specific activities based on talks. Users can create and manage tasks by conversing with the AI assistant on any platform, or by using a dedicated tasks manager tab available only in the online app.

ChatGPT may now browse the web on a specified schedule thanks to the tasks function, but it will not perform background searches or make purchases. For example, you may advise ChatGPT to check once a month for concert tickets to see your favourite musician in your area, but you can't tell the AI assistant to notify you when the tickets go on sale, nor can ChatGPT buy them for you. Nonetheless, it represents a step towards those systems.

Before making the functionality widely available on its mobile app and ChatGPT free tier, OpenAI says it is using this trial phase to gather more information about how users complete jobs. According to the firm, Advanced Voice Mode cannot be used to assign tasks during this test launch.

Large language model-based AI assistants have expanded the capabilities of computers, but they also have trouble with some basic activities that smartphones can perform. To get their assistants to create reminders and set timers, OpenAI, Google, and other AI model developers have had to devise ingenious workarounds. Even though the stakes are low for these activities, OpenAI intends ChatGPT to be able to handle far more difficult jobs in the future.

More sophisticated agentic systems, such as an agent allegedly named Operator that can write programming and make trip reservations, are being prepared for release by OpenAI. According to Bloomberg, that system may be arriving in the coming weeks.

More potential issues arise with increasingly complex agentic systems. Tasks displays a reasonably constrained range of agentic skills, but if OpenAI releases more autonomous AI systems in the upcoming months, its security measures might be put to the test.