OpenAI introduced dots on September 29, joining Grok Bot and Meta’s Muse in a growing lineup of personal AI agents. These assistants can have their own cloud computers, remember a ton of context (more than I can at times), work across connected tools, and keep working between conversations.
You can give one a name, too. Mine is pj.
I started testing pj on Wednesday, and over the last few days, our conversations have ranged from client projects to my ten year old’s math homework (pj saved the day on that one with a quick quiz review for Beckett).
Beyond that, pj has also started bringing things to my attention without waiting for me to ask, like multiple calendar conflicts (I’m often guilty of this), a reminder for school picture day, and a callout that something I said in an email was just wrong (pj had gone back and reviewed the transcript from a meeting to fact check me respectfully).
That’s where I think this category gets interesting, and where the football version of a handoff starts to fit. You give someone else the ball and let them carry it down the field. You’re still part of the play, but you don’t have to be the one gaining every yard.
Most of us could come up with a pretty long list of things we’d like someone to handle. Some are work projects. Some are household admin. Some are tiny details that become a problem when you miss them. These agents are starting to give us someone to hand those things to.
A PEEK INSIDE MY TEXT MESSAGES
I’ve gotten a similar text from over a dozen people in the last month… they sound something like “I keep hearing about GrokBot! Do I need that?” or “Zuckerberg has my attention with that Muse thing… think I should try it?”
So hopefully I can save you a little time and give you a quick rundown on the three biggest names in the space (apologies to Instinct and Hermes, you didn’t make the cut):
- Grok Bot, from xAI, emphasizes bots with names, jobs, and ongoing context. Each works on a persistent cloud computer, and there are shared team options for jobs such as answering internal questions or handling requests.
- Muse, from Meta, covers personal goals and everyday tasks. They have had a ton of early momentum and are rolling out advanced shopping features (you can sort of see where Meta wants to take the ad angle of this).
- dots, from OpenAI, brings an ongoing assistant into ChatGPT. You give it goals, connect the apps it needs, and define what it can do on its own. Can connect to any tool you already connect ChatGPT to.
The tools and permissions you connect determine how useful any of these can be. An assistant needs access to the school email to notice picture day, or the project conversations to tell you what’s waiting on your review. I’ll be honest, it took me a LONG time to get all my Teams, Slacks, Calendars, and Emails connected to pj. I know I have more than most people (I don’t want to talk about it), but once I did the annoying wiring, it was downright magical.
LET SOMEBODY ELSE CARRY THE BALL
There are even more stories that I think inspire and make you think “how would I use this?”
- One client had their agent categorize more than 10,000 unsorted emails. Just sit with that number for a second. That’s a backlog that had been causing this client stress for months (maybe years, no one’s judging). It flagged important things for him and saved countless hours.
- At home, my son and I were working on integer homework. I sent pj an example of the questions that would be on tomorrow’s quiz and asked for 20 more expressions in the same style, with two PDFs: a worksheet and a separate answer key.
- On the work side, I asked pj to review my meeting notes and emails and tell me which projects were moving and which might be waiting on my review. It pulled together a review queue, distinguished my next steps from things waiting on someone else, and linked back to the original conversations. We then narrowed the discussion to one client and worked through the open items there.
- One Grok Bot user describes a travel routine built around the family’s school calendar, points balances, and preferred destinations. The bot sends a morning text with relevant deals when it finds them. Their account.
- Another user, a store operator, reports having a bot download daily sales and accounting data, add calculated fields, and format a file for QuickBooks Online. A second routine prepares a daily month-to-date email showing store managers their KPIs against goals. Their account.
I think the appeal becomes clearer when you start naming your own assignments. The email pile. The school update. The worksheet. The project you need to get back into before tomorrow’s meeting. The daily numbers that somebody has to download and organize.