Here’s How OpenAI’s New Deep Research Tool Could Change Your Workplace

OpenAI continues to champion the rise of AI agents, and now may be pushing that promotion to another level. Agents are next-generation AI tools, capable of acting on their own in a digital environment, and they’re potentially much more useful than the question-and-response AI chatbot systems we’re all getting used to. Demonstrating exactly how transformative agents could be, OpenAI has just released a new tool for ChatGPT called Deep Research that seems like it can speedily tackle a critical business task that could normally eat up days or even weeks of a worker’s time: gathering data and synthesizing it into a report. In an FAQ page explaining what the tool can do, OpenAI explains it’s “perfect for people who do intense knowledge work in areas like finance, science, and law,” or “researchers and discerning shoppers who need thorough, precise, and reliable research.” It’s particularly good at “finding niche, non-intuitive information that would involve multiple steps across numerous websites,” OpenAI says. It works like this: You ask the tool to look for information on a particular topic, adding images, files, or extra data like PDFs or spreadsheets to add context and help explain your query, which could be useful in, say, a question about financial information. OpenAI says it will sometimes pop up a form to ask for specific information before it starts gathering data so it can create a “more focused and relevant” answer. The final report is “fully documented with clear citations to sources,” so you can make sure that the information it found is both relevant and correct—streamlining the important step of checking whether the AI has hallucinated the info or if it’s real. Speaking at an event in Washington D.C. to show off the new tool, OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil made some bold claims about the tech, the New York Times reported. It’ll be able to do “complex research tasks that might take a person anywhere from 30 minutes to 30 days,” Weil said, adding that the tool will complete these tasks in maybe five to 30 minutes. It’s also able to search recursively, meaning it can do a single search, then, when that leads to other data sources, it can look for those too. If this sounds a lot like the kind of data-gathering task you might set for an intern or a junior employee when you begin a new program at work or when you encounter a novel problem that’s holding up a big project, then you’re likely thinking along the right lines. These seem to be exactly the sort of use cases that OpenAI has in mind. Users on Reddit who have used the tool are singing its praises. One highlighted the “time differential between the time it takes to complete its work compared to a human,” noting that “by some OpenAI employee estimates, it seems to be roughly 15x at the moment,” meaning it can complete a research task about 15 times faster than a human. That raises the question of when Deep Research could become cheaper and more effective to use than tasking an expensive worker to tackle these workplace chores. The Redditor projects how this might play out: If we imagine more advanced AI models that “can perform all the tasks of a lower-skill office job, but complete 3 weeks of work in a single working day,” then it’s quite simple to imagine “the cost of labour rapidly approaching zero as certain job sectors become automated.” Another user summed it up even more clearly: “Pro user here, just tried out my first Deep Research prompt and holy moly was it good. The insights it provided frankly I think would have taken a person, not just a person, but an absolute expert at least an entire day of straight work and research to put together, probably more.” This new tool may reignite the “will AI steal my job?” debate, but it also has great potential to transform many office tasks. Since it can speedily perform research, your staff may have more work hours available to actually respond to the data delivered from the research task, versus spending time trawling for info. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON