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OpenAI's cartoon Dots agent works like office software that runs other apps on a virtual machine
OpenAI is selling Dots, a cartoon agent that runs apps on a virtual machine, first to top-tier accounts like the $100-a-month Pro plan. Its errands for The Verge kept ending in human takeovers, so desk work in a team's own apps is the case to test.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Booking an internet installation, Dot stalled at a press-and-hold human check its browser controls could not perform and asked the reviewer to do it.
- At checkout it asked for bank details, with no saved-card setup like Muse's Stripe integration, and the reviewer finished the order on their own computer.
- Dot offered a $35 coworking day pass while Instinct's agent found the free tour and booked it within minutes.
- Looping security checks kept Dot out of the reviewer's Ikea account, and a neighborhood teriyaki shop's ordering page refused it entirely.
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Why it matters
- cost At $1,200 a year per account against free rivals, Dots lands on a team budget line, and the person who approves it has to justify the spend with finished tasks.
- exposure Granting desktop-app access hands the agent the same machine and inbox an employee works from, so whoever switches it on answers for what it opens.
- constraint Any workflow that crosses third-party websites still needs a person standing by for as long as sites block OpenAI's cloud browser traffic.
- decision Pilots are better started on tasks inside apps the team controls, where bot checks and payment screens do not come up.
"I jumped to the wrong conclusion," Dot said when The Verge's reviewer phoned it to ask why it had missed a free coworking tour [17]. The reviewer hung up [17]. Any user can call their Dot to work through a task out loud [7].
Each Dot gets a blobby avatar and a name the user chooses, the same treatment Meta gave Muse [2]. The product underneath looks more like an office desktop. The user chats with the agent in one window and watches it click around a virtual machine in another [4]. That machine comes with Blender and GIMP [5], and the desktop ChatGPT app can give the agent the user's own computer [6]. The Verge summed it up as "business software that can use other software" [10].
OpenAI is offering Dots first to its highest-tier accounts, including the $100-a-month Pro plan [8]. Over a year that plan costs $1,200 per account [1]. The reviewer expensed it [21]. Muse and Instinct cost nothing, at least for now [9]. Each account gets one Dot today, and OpenAI says users will be able to have several later [3].
OpenAI says Dots "can do nearly anything" with the cloud computer and its apps [11]. The Verge tried it on personal errands [12]. Of the four it described, none finished without a person taking over or the agent getting it wrong [2]. Security checks tripped Dot more often than Muse or Instinct, according to the review [19]. Dot's explanation was a link to an OpenAI page about websites blocking its cloud browser traffic [19]. Overall it needed more manual input and browser takeovers than the other agents [20].
Its clearest win came from the user's own data. While booking an internet installation, Dot found a $100 promotional discount in an email the reviewer had mass-deleted [13]. Through the desktop app, the same agent can operate the user's own computer [6].
I'd pilot Dots on work inside software the team already controls, on the agent's virtual machine or a managed laptop, before trusting it with web errands. The tradeoff is exposure: the access that found a buried discount also reaches everything else in that inbox. Sort each candidate task on two lines. One is whether it runs inside the team's own software or on third-party websites. The other is whether it ends at a login or a payment. Own software with neither is the quadrant to try first. The Verge's errands all ran on third-party sites [2].
Over a pilot week, log how many times a person had to step in per finished task, and time each takeover against doing the job by hand. A Dot that needs a person on most tasks costs the $100 monthly seat [8] plus that person's time.
What to watch
- Whether OpenAI opens Dots to cheaper ChatGPT tiers, moving the buyer from budget holders to individuals.
- How OpenAI prices multiple Dots per account once it ships the feature it says is coming.
- Whether websites stop blocking OpenAI's cloud browser traffic, the cause Dot cited for its security-check failures.