OpenAI Launches Dots, Always-On AI Agents That Work in the Background

My take: OpenAI just launched Dots, AI agents that don't wait for step by step instructions: you give them a goal and they work on their own in the background, respond inside Slack or Microsoft Teams, connect to thousands of apps, and can even coordinate with each other to split up the work.

This is a real shift in how AI gets used at work. Until now, most of us have used it the way you'd ask an assistant a question and wait for the answer. With Dots, the idea is to hand off an entire task (reviewing customer feedback, following up on a project, running an analysis) and let the agent carry it forward without you standing over every step.

For any business, that means the limit is no longer how many hours your team has, it's how many tasks you can properly delegate to an agent and how well you know how to supervise it. And for an employee or freelancer, learning to design those goals well (which task to delegate, with what limits, how to check the result) is becoming a skill as important as writing a good email.

What repetitive task at your job would you delegate to an agent today if you knew it could work on its own and only check in with you once it's done?