Roboshop How 'Al agents' will change the way we live

Tech firms are betting that autonomous digital assistants that carry out household tasks will be the next big thing.But can we really rely on them to get the groceries in?

- By Victoria Turk

I'm watching artificial intelligence order my groceries. Armed with my shopping list, it types each item into the search bar of a supermarket website, then uses its cursor to click. Watching what appears to be a digital ghost do this task is strangely transfixing. "Are you sure it's not just a person in India?" my husband asks, peering over my shoulder.

I'm trying out Operator, a new AI "agent" from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Made available to UK users last month, it has a similar text interface and conversational tone to ChatGPT, but rather than just answering questions, it can actually do things - provided they involve navigating a web browser.

Hot on the heels of large language models, AI agents have been trumpeted as the next big thing. Similar to OpenAI's offering, Anthropic introduced "computer use" capabilities to its Claude chatbot late last year. Perplexity and Google have also released "agentic" features into their AI assistants, with further companies developing agents aimed at specific tasks, such as coding or research.

There's debate over what exactly counts as an AI agent, but the general idea is that they need to be able to take actions with some degree of autonomy. "As soon as something is starting to execute actions outside of the chat window, then it's gone from being a chatbot to an agent," said Margaret Mitchell, the chief ethics scientist at AI company Hugging Face.

It's early days. Most commercially available agents come with a disclaimer that they're still experimental and you can find plenty of examples online of them making amusing mistakes, such as spending $31 on a dozen eggs or trying to deliver groceries back to the shop they bought them from.

Depending on who you ask, agents are just the next overhyped tech toy or the dawn of an AI future that could shake up the workforce, reshape the internet and change how we live.