OpenAI’s New Developer Tools Make Building AI Agents Easy

Earlier this week, OpenAI released two new solutions aimed at helping developers create AI-powered agents capable of going beyond just answering questions and actually taking actions, like approving refunds or buying plane tickets. Executives from OpenAI and cloud storage platform Box say these new development tools will make it much easier for businesses to take advantage of the cutting-edge tech. In a live streamed video on Tuesday, March 11, a group of OpenAI employees introduced the Agents software development kit (SDK) as well as the Responses application programming interface (API). The SDK gives developers a framework that enables applications built with OpenAI’s models to access additional tools and capabilities, like searching across files, parsing the internet, running code, or controlling a computer. The Responses API connects the company’s models to applications that require those new agentic capabilities. In essence, think of the SDK as a spell book and the API as a magic wand. The SDK gives developers the language needed to call upon these new powers, and the API channels those powers from their source (OpenAI) to an application. Developers give each agent a name, a set of instructions to follow (like “you are a customer support specialist … ”), and a defined set of tools that enables them to use specific capabilities or functions. In the live stream, the employees created an AI stylist agent as an example of how the new developer tools can be leveraged to create more useful AI applications. They gave the stylist agent two tools: the ability to search the internet, and access to a private database containing information about the OpenAI employees’ personal style. The agent used the insights from this data to recommend nearby stores with products that could match those preferences. To show how easily developers can upgrade their AI apps with new functionality, the OpenAI employees then created a second agent, assigned it to handle customer support, and gave it the ability to search through a database of previous orders and submit refund requests. In order to swap between the stylist and customer support agents, the team created a third agent, tasked solely with using contextual understanding to “hand off” control from one agent to the other. Olivier Godement, leader of OpenAI’s API business, says that within 24 hours of the SDK and API’s announcement, “several companies” had already pushed new products into production. OpenAI chief commercial officer Giancarlo Lionetti says he’s seen customers develop billing agents to send out invoices, financial analyst agents to compare market information found online with internal databases, and application agents for automating user enrollment of new programs and initiatives. It wasn’t impossible for developers to build agents before, says Godement, but it was a complex process that required multiple APIs. With OpenAI’s simplifying the process and creating a set of built-in tools, he says, it’s easier and faster than ever to equip AI models with agentic capabilities. One of the first new products built using the new API and SDK comes from Box, the cloud-based data storage platform. Box chief technology officer Ben Kus says that within 48 hours of receiving the development tools, his team created an agent that can connect proprietary data stored on the platform with OpenAI’s models, and use that information to accomplish various tasks. Imagine you have an e-commerce business and want to automate a customer service task, such as approving or denying a refund. You could create an agent, give it access to specific data on Box containing your company’s refund policy and customer order history, and then give it the ability to execute code approving or rejecting the claim based on the analyzed data. Box is so sure about agents’ ability to leverage data that the company is redesigning its internal search functions to be more agent-friendly. The data that a human may find useful when searching through their internal files isn’t necessarily as valuable to an AI agent, says Kus, so his team has been tailoring search integrations to ensure agents can obtain as much relevant information as possible. OpenAI’s Godement expects businesses to gradually become more ambitious with their agentic use cases over the next few months. Before long, he says, it could be common for an individual’s personal agent, with access to their identification and credit card info, to make transactions simply by conversing with a merchant’s agent. Basically, instead of scouring the internet yourself to buy a new sweater, your personal agent will handle the searching and shopping for you. A word of caution, though: Don’t overwhelm agents with an excess of information. With too much context, your agent may be a jack of all trades, but a master of none. Instead, Kus suggests thinking through how you’d accomplish a given task with humans, and then creating individual agents for every step of the workflow you’re hoping to automate. “Each agent has a job to be done,” says Lionetti, “and if you want it to do that job really well, it needs to be focused.” BY BEN SHERRY @BENLUCASSHERRY