Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

In recent years, being gobsmacked by AI’s ever-expanding capabilities has become my new normal. More importantly, I’ve found the technology increasingly essential to my own productivity.

That changed when I gave OpenAI’s new Dots agent access to my calendar and email. Shortly thereafter, it alerted me to a discrepancy it had spotted. I’d entered a speaking engagement on one date, but a confirmation email mentioned a different day. It turned out that the organizers had forgotten to tell me they’d rescheduled their event. If I’d shown up on the original day, my audience would have consisted of an empty room.

That’s only one of several instances when Dots has proactively brought a significant fact to my attention without me having to ask about it. All of a sudden, agents feel less like a vacuous buzzword and more like a core benefit of weaving AI into my workflow.

OpenAI announced Dots on September 29 at its DevDay conference keynote in San Francisco. So far, it’s only available to people who pay for ChatGPT’s pricier tiers, starting at $100 a month. But the company plans to take agentic AI wide, once it’s refined Dots further and figured out the economics.

(The service runs on OpenAI’s powerful GPT-6 Astra model, which was announced earlier in September, and gives each user a Linux computer in the cloud for Dots to use.)

“You should of course expect us to do a mass-market thing for billions of people someday,” declared CEO Sam Altman at a post-keynote press Q&A.

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