ChatGPT can now create a PowerPoint presentation or make purchases online for you — with just a prompt.

On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled the new ChatGPT agent, a versatile AI tool designed to handle complex tasks on behalf of users, such as web searching, running code, and producing slideshows and spreadsheets. This AI agent independently clicks, types, and submits forms based on natural language prompts, allowing users to interrupt its actions at any time. This development is part of OpenAI’s mission to enhance ChatGPT’s abilities, enabling it to perform autonomous tasks rather than simply serving as a question-answering chatbot. As of March, ChatGPT boasted over 500 million global weekly users.

The ChatGPT agent also functions as a virtual assistant, integrating with applications like Gmail and Google Calendar to execute tasks such as drafting emails and scheduling appointments. It performs these actions through its virtual computer, seamlessly switching between reasoning and action to follow instructions.

OpenAI claims the new tool can “analyze three competitors and make a slide deck” — the agent formulates a plan, navigates websites, and generates an editable slideshow.

It can also create editable Excel spreadsheets by taking in a prompt like “make a spreadsheet based on the San Francisco annual comprehensive financial reports (ACFR).”

The agent can also shop online for users, though it will always ask for approval before carrying out a sensitive action, like entering personal information or making a purchase.

OpenAI is embedding the agent within ChatGPT and allowing paying users to access it immediately by selecting “agent mode” in ChatGPT’s dropdown tool menu. The agent starts rolling out today for Pro, Plus, and Team users, with plans to become available to Enterprise and Education customers over the summer.

^{OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

OpenAI says the agent could help workers, like financial analysts, complete tasks more quickly.

“We think that this model is actually going to be quite good at low-level, first-, second-year, financial analysis type work that might have taken someone a night to do if they’re getting pinged by their boss late at night,” ChatGPT agent product manager Neel Ajjarapu told The Wall Street Journal.

ChatGPT isn’t the first AI tool to be able to make PowerPoint presentations, but it is the most mainstream AI product to offer the agentic capability. Other AI presentation tools include Microsoft Copilot, which is integrated into PowerPoint and can generate presentations from prompts, and Google Workspace add-on SlidesAI.io, which converts any text into a Google Slides presentation.

Meanwhile, other companies are leveraging internal AI tools to create slide decks. For example, McKinsey consultants are using an internal AI tool to create PowerPoint presentations, taking over junior employee tasks.

OpenAI was valued at $300 billion in March following a $40 billion funding round.

ChatGPT agent is a combination of two other agents OpenAI released earlier this year: Operator, which can browse the web to fill out forms and take action like a virtual assistant, and Deep Research, which searches the web for answers to research questions and presents the findings in a paper with citations — though it far exceeds the capabilities of both.

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