How OpenAI turned its coding tools into dots, an always-on personal assistant

OpenAI released dots, an always-on AI personal assistant, at its developer day in late September 2026. The assistant is available in ChatGPT’s desktop and mobile apps for Pro-tier subscribers and above, with plans starting at $100 per month. After users connect calendars, email, computers and other tools, dots can work in the background, flag schedule conflicts and deadlines, research ways to help, and propose actions without requiring a new prompt for every task. Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI’s enterprise product team, said dots repackages capabilities that users could obtain through OpenAI’s Codex coding app with more setup and supervision. He described a “proactive research” feature that periodically considers a user’s conversations and connected resources to identify possible assistance. OpenAI says dots has ChatGPT’s existing privacy controls, including an option to stop conversations from being used for model training and controls over accessible computer resources. Embiricos said the controls need to become much more granular; the app currently will not accept read-only access to cloud drives. He also said early versions sometimes surfaced calendar conflicts too late. OpenAI is discussing agent interactions with payment processors, but Embiricos said the company works closely with the broader ecosystem before adding abilities for agents to act in the world.