A little over a week ago I reluctantly paid $200 last week to try out OpenAI’s new Operator web app designed to allow you to automate complex tasks. The tool, a new website included in the ChatGPT Pro subscription offering, lets you command a virtual machine to go out and complete requests via a browser. It’s similar to what Rabbit created for their LAM feature for the R1 gadget, if you’re familiar with that.

Upon opening Operator, you’ll see a range of suggestions like trip planning, food delivery, and restaurant booking. Those are all compelling things to automate, but they’re not necessarily things that average people do constantly. The fact that OpenAI sees these as Operator’s strengths at the moment might help in-part explain why it’s gated to the $200/month subscription. While I can’t exactly get myself to aggressively integrate Operator into my workflow, particularly because I am not comfortable signing into accounts on remote virtual machines, I can see how it is the future. I would love to send my Operator out to clean up my inbox, to beautify presentations, to organize paywalled stories across sites, to post on all social media sites for me at once, to clean up storage space on my machines, to create watchlists on streaming platforms, and so on. The possibilities are endless, but the reality is that we need Operator to run locally or a formal API that securely interfaces with these services. I do not want a remote browser controlled by someone else to have carte blanche access to my most important accounts. Without granting Operator those credentials, it isn’t particularly useful.

There’s another piece of the puzzle worth touching on, which is that Operator is just not quite necessary yet for me personally. I quickly realized that I just don’t need it, despite how amazing it is to play with. Even some of the tasks I described above as use cases that make sense for me personally are things I often enjoy doing on my own. It also happens to just not be quite ready. While playing with it, Operator would occasionally get lost or confused when browsing certain sites. OpenAI has acknowledged this is the case, but I still fear it doing something it shouldn’t. We’ll see how it evolves over the next few months. Ultimately, once Operator is part of a standard ChatGPT Plus subscription, it may be more palatable. But for now, you really don’t need to spend the money to try it.