OpenAI product lead Alexander Embiricos described how dots adapts the company’s coding-agent capabilities into a background assistant inside ChatGPT.
OpenAI developed dots as a persistent assistant that can work in the background and surface help without waiting for a new prompt. Alexander Embiricos, who leads the company’s enterprise product team, discussed the product at TechCrunch Disrupt in October. OpenAI introduced dots at its developer event in late September, and it is available through ChatGPT’s desktop and mobile apps to subscribers on the Pro tier or higher; plans start at $100 per month.
When users connect dots to resources such as their calendar, email and computer, it can monitor information and offer assistance. Embiricos described the product as a more approachable way to use capabilities that people could already assemble with OpenAI’s Codex app, the company’s coding tool. That earlier approach, he said, demanded more setup and ongoing direction. Dots instead presents the assistant as one continuing interaction rather than a collection of separate conversations.
Proactive behavior is a key part of the design. Embiricos described a feature called proactive research that periodically considers what the assistant knows from conversations and permitted data sources, then proposes ways it could help. He also recounted an engineer’s account of a dot detecting and analyzing an outage before the engineer noticed it. TechCrunch’s own testing found that the assistant could flag calendar conflicts and deadlines, though alerts did not always arrive early enough to be useful.
The product’s access to personal information also raises questions about control. OpenAI says dots follows ChatGPT’s privacy settings: users can disable model training and manage which computer resources the assistant can access. The article noted that those permissions were not yet very granular and that dots would not accept read-only access to cloud drives. Embiricos said more detailed controls are needed. He also said OpenAI is in discussions with payment processors, but the article described payments as a possible future capability, not a feature already available.