‘Virtual employees’ could join workforce as soon as this year, OpenAI boss says

Virtual employees could join workforces this year and transform how companies work, according to the chief executive of OpenAI.

The first artificial intelligence agents may start working for organisations this year, wrote Sam Altman, as AI firms push for uses that generate returns on substantial investment in the technology.

Microsoft, the biggest backer of the company behind ChatGPT, has already announced the introduction of AI agents – tools that can carry out tasks autonomously – with blue-chip consulting firm McKinsey among the early adopters.

“We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies,” wrote Altman in a blogpost published on Monday.

OpenAI is reportedly planning to launch an AI agent codenamed “Operator” this month, after Microsoft announced its Copilot Studio product and rival Anthropic launched the Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model, which can carry out tasks on the computer such as moving a mouse cursor and typing text.

McKinsey, for instance, is building an agent to process new client inquiries by carrying out tasks such as scheduling follow-up meetings. The consulting firm has predicted that by 2030, activities accounting for up to 30% of hours worked across the US economy could be automated.

Bloomberg reported that Operator will use a computer to take actions on a user’s behalf, such as writing code or booking travel.

Last year, Microsoft’s head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, indicated the company is moving towards agents that can make purchasing decisions, saying he had seen “stunning demos” where the agent carries out transactions independently, although there have also been “car crash moments” in development. However, an agent with these capabilities will emerge “in quarters, not years”, Suleyman said.

Before making the agent prediction, Altman also wrote in his blog that OpenAI knows how to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical term that he has referred to in the past as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans”.

“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,” he wrote, adding that OpenAI was now turning its ambitions towards “superintelligence”.

“We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else,” he wrote.

“Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.”

Altman also participated in a Q&A with Bloomberg published this weekend in which he predicted that Elon Musk will continue his feud with OpenAI this year, but will stop short of using his relationship with Donald Trump to hurt the company.

Altman said he expected the world’s richest person to maintain his legal battle with OpenAI, although he played down the prospect of being challenged to a cage fight with Musk, who asked Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg for a mixed martial arts bout in 2023.

“I think he’ll do all sorts of bad s***. I think he’ll continue to sue us and drop lawsuits and make new lawsuits and whatever else,” Altman told Bloomberg.

“He hasn’t challenged me to a cage match yet, but I don’t think he was that serious about it with Zuck, either, it turned out … he says a lot of things, starts them, undoes them, gets sued, sues, gets in fights with the government, gets investigated by the government. That’s just Elon being Elon.”

Musk dropped an initial lawsuit against OpenAI in June last year but returned two months later with a new complaint that has been expanded to include Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest backer. The suit accuses OpenAI of pursuing profit over safety and “actively trying to eliminate competitors”.

Musk and Altman have a fractious history. The two co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before Musk left the company over an internal power struggle several years later. OpenAI was founded with the aim of building “safe and beneficial” AGI.

Altman added that he did not expect Musk to use his influence within the incoming Trump administration to hobble competitors such as OpenAI. Musk launched a new AI business, xAI, in 2023.

“Will he abuse his political power of being co-president, or whatever he calls himself now, to mess with a business competitor? I don’t think he’ll do that. I genuinely don’t. May turn out to be proven wrong,” he said.