OpenAI’s Dot agent is enterprise software that can also order your dinner

With my human ability to click and hold a button, Dot got all the way to the checkout screen, where it asked me to input my bank account details. Turns out there’s no slick Stripe integration like Muse has to save your credit card info and use a virtual card for checkout. And in any case, the new provider needed my bank account to get a $5 discount on my bill every month. Dot paused to let me enter the numbers into the virtual browser; I didn’t trust it well enough to punch in my checking account number and decided to just do it all myself on my own computer. Not exactly a spectacular start.

I gave Dot a few other personal tasks, and the results were mixed. It couldn’t find the option for a free tour and entry at a coworking space I’ve been meaning to try out, and instead offered to sign me up for a $35 day pass. I had Instinct’s agent, which I’ve also been testing, look for the trial option; it found it and set up an appointment within minutes. “Why did you miss this option?” I questioned Dot over the phone after the incident. “I jumped to the wrong conclusion,” it said. I hung up.

Later, I had it try to retrieve some information in my Ikea account about a hanging planter I bought. It reported that it was unable to log in to my Ikea account because it got stuck in a looping security check. Elsewhere on the internet, the neighborhood teriyaki spot wouldn’t allow Dot onto its ordering page. Something about Dot’s footprint seems to get it tripped up on security checks more often than Muse or Instinct; Dot offered a link to OpenAI’s page about websites blocking its cloud browser traffic as an explanation. Whatever the reason, it required more manual input and browser takeovers than other AI agents, possibly because it wasn’t purpose-built for ordering teriyaki or handling your Ikea returns.

I really saw Dot come into its element when I gave it access to something fully within my control: my personal website. It is embarrassingly outdated and I asked Dot to pull together a new, more streamlined design. It did, and when I sat down to type out some changes I want made for the next version, I thought, “To hell with it. I’ll just give it a call.” I hashed out the changes I wanted section by section over 10 minutes, walked away to do some dishes, and got a ping that the next iteration was ready for me to review. Not perfect, but better. Once again, AI proves most helpful when you give it a large dataset (me rambling for 10 minutes) it can turn into something useful. I carried out a few more rounds of iterations chatting with Dot in a browser window on my computer and using voice-to-text on the phone app as I walked around the house cleaning up Brio train tracks and stuffies.

Something about Dot’s footprint seems to get it tripped up on security checks more often than Muse or Instinct

Dot made a lot more sense once I gave it access to my computer. There, I gave it two tasks: Put together a handful of video files on my desktop featuring a TV hit I did into one clip sized properly for social media, and deploy the changes to my personal website that we had worked through in a prototype. I had to give it a shocking number of permissions, but it worked. I watched it click around the website backend and re-create the prototype block by block. I walked away from the computer and got updates on the ChatGPT app on my phone — the consolidated video clip was ready, which I reviewed while I drank a coffee. It was the most Silicon Valley I’ve ever felt in my life.

I absolutely could have figured out how to put all those clips together myself. In fact, I did the first time around, but it looked janky and was too big to upload on any social media website. Dot did a much better job and I had a clip to share within minutes. It handled the website update, too. The new design is basic, but it’s miles ahead of the complicated, out-of-date version I’d been rocking until yesterday. Gotta hand it to Dotty McDotface.

Dot makes a lot more sense when you think of it and use it as “Codex, but for regular people” — a cute little blob that can take care of some part of your business while you do other things. Where the more personal AI agents like Muse feel like glorified autofill and a universal online shopping cart, Dot seems like a harbinger of the future of work.

Or a future of work. Presumably, since you pay for it upfront, it won’t be subject to the kind of monetization pressure as Muse and Instinct eventually will, which makes sense for enterprise software. Nobody wants to be nagged by AI while they work . That is, assuming you do the kind of work that AI can help you with, and you trust OpenAI to do it. Big caveats!

It helped me out with some tasks that, if I’m being honest, I would have just not gotten around to doing. That’s pretty handy. But I don’t think it’s $100-a-month handy, at least in my line of work. I can see how it would be much more useful to someone like our friend Casey Newton, who’s in the thick of launching a new business .

And with some help logging into my Uber Eats account, it did actually order my teriyaki in the end.