👉 Background: OpenAI became a household name back in 2022 when it launched the first public version of ChatGPT. Since then, the AI industry has exploded, and every other tech company under the sun try their luck to get involved (Think: Google, Meta, Alibaba, Amazon, X and many more).

‍👉 What happened: Now, OpenAI has announced it’s launching a new product called Operator which is a general-purpose AI agent — that means it can take control of a web-browser and independently perform actions. The idea is that it’s basically your personal assistant.

‍👉 What else: AI agents have been pitched as the next big thing in AI - so this will be the first major test to see how real that is.

What's the key learning?

💡AI agents could be moving from assistants to replacements. We’ve all heard the fear mongering that “AI is coming for our jobs.” but it hasn’t quite come to fruition yet.

💡 With the rollout of AI agents, you can see how it could start to perform a whole range of human tasks. AI agents could replace customer service agents, appointments setters and even salespeople. In fact, Salesforce reckons that sales team using AI saw their sales grow 17% more than those teams not using AI.

💡And this market is expected to get even bigger. The global AI agents market size was valued at $3.86 billion USD in 2023 and is expected to grow at 45% each year from 2024 to 2030.