OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, says 2025 marks a turning point for ChatGPT — not just in what it can tell users, but in what it can do for them. Speaking to CNBC-TV18 in an exclusive interview, Weil said the AI is moving beyond its role as a conversational tool and into the territory of taking real-world actions on behalf of users.
“When I think about the time I spend on the web, I bet 30 or 40% of the time that I am browsing the web, it’s not because I want to be doing what I am doing. It is because I have to get something done, and there’s a series of pages and forms I have to fill out and other things,” Weil said, adding how he would love for an AI to do that for him “so that I can concentrate on either getting more work done or spending more time with my family.”
“This is the year that ChatGPT goes from answering questions for you to doing things for you in the real world,” he said.
Weil referred to an agentic AI model, called Operator, which he says is a blueprint for how AI can go from answering questions to doing things for you.
“[Operator] can order food for you through an online food ordering website. But it can also fill out forms. It can shop. It can do anything that you would do on the web.”
According to Weil, users remain fully in control of what the AI does, with Operator acting as a digital assistant that can carry out tasks across websites just like a person would. “…of course, you’re in control the whole way. Before it takes a sort of definitive action, it will pause and ask you if you want it to continue some action.”
Also read: OpenAI unveils new AI models that can ‘think with images’
ChatGPT’s journey began in 2022, when OpenAI released the first version of the chatbot built on its GPT-3.5 model. What started as a research experiment quickly caught the imagination of millions. Within days, the chatbot went viral, finding use in everything from coding help to creative writing and customer service.
By 2023, OpenAI had rolled out GPT-4, which brought significant improvements in reasoning, speed, and reliability. It could handle images as well as text, and began to be integrated into professional tools like Microsoft Word, Excel, and Teams through OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft.
As more people started to rely on it daily, OpenAI introduced a subscription model with premium access to the most powerful models. Businesses also began embedding ChatGPT into their workflows, automating processes and streamlining communication.
Now in 2025, ChatGPT is no longer just a chatbot. It’s a digital agent capable of navigating websites, interacting with forms, and completing transactions. This evolution has been accelerated by products like Operator, which combine language understanding with web-browsing abilities and task execution.
Weil said the focus remains on making AI useful and intuitive for everyday users, not just developers or enterprises.
ChatGPT’s leap from passive assistant to active agent represents a new phase not just for OpenAI, but for how people interact with technology itself — from typing out instructions to simply asking and letting the AI do the rest.
Also read: Exclusive | OpenAI product chief says India its fastest-growing market, ChatGPT grew 2x in a year
