OpenAI bets enterprises are ready to delegate real work to autonomous agents

OpenAI says true agentic AI has finally arrived, pushing beyond the trivial capabilities of early-stage virtual assistants.

This week at OpenAI Dev Day, the company introduced Dots, which CEO Sam Altman described as “remarkably capable, always-on” agents powered by GPT‑6 Astra. Dots have their own cloud computer, can be accessed in ChatGPT, Slack, or Teams, and plug into more than 4,000 apps based on human-set boundaries.

In a keynote, Altman said using it will feel like “a whole new way to work with AI.”

“It can hugely magnify your ability and expand your potential, working 24/7 to take on things that you don’t want to do, so you can focus on higher-level work,” he said.

OpenAI also announced a slew of other new capabilities and tools, including GPT-6.1 Sol, a cheaper and faster sibling of GPT-6.1 Astra, which was shelved earlier this week due to safety concerns. Additionally, Codex is also now in the cloud, Codex CLI has voice control and can help developers inspect, edit, and run code locally, and a new Agents API supports computer use and provides components like harnesses, hosting, memory, and multi-agent controls.

Dots goes beyond ‘trivial’ tasks

Early virtual assistants have been useful for quick handoff tasks like booking reservations, but that is “trivial relative to what the technology can do,” Altman contended in his keynote.

Taking that to the next level, OpenAI’s new Dots can understand what’s happening in a user’s workflows and learns over time without requiring constant human instruction, he explained. Soon, users will be able to access Dots outside ChatGPT by interacting with it through text messages or even by calling the agents on the phone to discuss updates, changes, and weigh in on decision-making.

“You can delegate ambitious pieces of work the way you would to a high agency engineer or a chief of staff,” Altman said. Dots can monitor incoming bug reports and propose fixes, draft pull requests (PRs), or take on tasks like kicking off the next year’s budget planning cycle.

Altman provided the example of migrating an app off a legacy API. This can be difficult, because the API might be used all over a code base, he said, and it could break as developers start making changes. But Dots can trace dependencies and determine what needs to change, run tests, and suggest next steps.

“Think about how you would have done that the old way,” Altman noted. “How many people would have been involved? How much time would it have taken them? What could they have done instead?”

Dots is now available to all ChatGPT Pro, Business Premium, and Enterprise users. OpenAI is also now previewing specialist Dots for enterprises, and is working with Microsoft to integrate Dots into Agent 365. These will serve as virtual teammates to help scale more intensive work in accounting, marketing, or legal, Altman explained.

Carmi Levy, an independent technology analyst, said of everything announced at DevDay 2026, Dots might be the most impactful, as it represents OpenAI’s definitive move into AI agents.

While Meta has been grabbing headlines with its app store-topping Muse, OpenAI’s offering is potentially more relevant to enterprise decision makers who are still trying to figure out how agents can fit into their corporate AI development and deployment roadmap, he noted.

“It allows enterprise customers to build on their pre-existing investments in OpenAI’s stack, and represents a familiar adoption path for developers,” he said.

Cheaper and faster sibling of Astra

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra to a limited group of users earlier this month, calling it state-of-the-art in computer use, browsing, software engineering, cybersecurity, science, and professional work. But its generally availability was canceled this week after the model failed critical internal safety and alignment tests.

OpenAI learned from the experiment, Altman said, with early testers demanding: “make it cheaper and make it faster.” The answer to that is GPT 6.1 Sol, which provides near Astra level intelligence at one-fifth of the price. Cached inputs cost $0.10 (US) per million tokens, 95% less than standard input pricing. This makes it cheaper for agents to work through longer tasks, reuse context, and ruminate on solutions. Example uses include multi-step business workflows, code writing and debugging, and document analysis.

GPT 6.1 Sol is “smarter than Astra in some ways, and it will become your daily workhorse,” Altman said. It is now available to all Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users of ChatGPT Work and Codex, and will soon be offered in an ‘Ultrafast’ plan, with up to 8X faster token generation.

Levy noted that GPT 6.1 Sol reduces the cost curve for enterprises looking to deploy AI agents at scale, all while “avoiding some of the privacy/safety/integrity baggage of the now-stillborn GPT 6.1 Astra.” It effectively shifts the economics of AI agents by dropping the price of resource-intensive development activities like querying repositories, running tests, and iterating code.

“It doesn’t have quite the power of Astra, but that was never what the average developer was looking for, anyway,” Levy noted. “Affordability still drives development decisions, and by leading with Sol, OpenAI removes one more barrier to broad-based adoption.”

New Codex capabilities, assurances around safety

In a much-anticipated move, OpenAI has introduced Codex Cloud, giving developers the ability to move coding tasks between devices without losing threads. “You don’t have to worry about closing your laptop in the middle of a run,” Altman said. “Your agents just keep working, wherever you are.”

Meanwhile, new Codex CLI capabilities allow developers to start, steer, delegate, and track tasks with voice commands, and a new Codex Security Cloud helps defenders identify vulnerabilities and prepare fixes.

Altman addressed the top-of-mind security and governance issue in his keynote. “The best version of AI is not about making people cogs in a giant machine,” he said, noting that there are some things that should not be automated.

“People often talk about AI as a new industrial revolution. I find that quite off-putting,” Altman said. “The future, if we get this right, can be much more like a new renaissance than a new industrial revolution.”

This article originally appeared on InfoWorld.