ChatGPT Agent

ChatGPT Agent is the first genuinely mainstream autonomous agent, and that's both its strength and its constraint. You describe a task in plain English - "book a table for four at a restaurant near King's Cross tomorrow at 7pm" - and it opens a browser, searches, clicks through menus, fills forms, and reports back. The autonomy is real: I've watched it recover from captchas, navigate multi-step checkout flows, and adjust when a page layout shifts mid-task. It doesn't just scrape; it interacts. Where it shines is repetitive web tasks that don't justify writing a scraper. I used it to pull quarterly earnings data from a dozen investor relations pages with inconsistent layouts. It handled pagination, clicked the right PDFs, and summarised findings without me touching the keyboard. For anyone who's ever copy-pasted from twenty tabs, that's a genuine time-saver. It's also surprisingly good at form-filling: I tested it on a grant application with conditional fields, and it parsed the requirements better than I expected. Failure modes are predictable. Complex e-commerce flows with dynamic pricing or aggressive bot detection will trip it up. It's cautious about financial transactions - rightly so - and will pause for confirmation more often than you'd like. Speed is middling; a task that takes you two minutes might take it five, though you're freed to do other work. The bigger limitation is scope: it lives inside ChatGPT's walled garden. You can't chain it with local scripts or feed it private APIs without manual handoff. Compared to something like Induced AI or Anthropic's computer-use demo, ChatGPT Agent is far less powerful but infinitely more accessible. No Docker, no API keys, no Python. That trade-off will suit most people most of the time. If you're already paying for ChatGPT Plus and you spend more than an hour a week on tedious web tasks, this pays for itself. If you need deep customisation or want to automate internal tools, look elsewhere.