Using the new agent mode in ChatGPT

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Using the new agent mode in ChatGPT
Agent mode in ChatGPT has the potential to change all of our working lives (and end them, perhaps). This blog explains how you can employ your own personal research assistant available (almost) free of charge 24 hours a day.

Posted by Andy Brown on 19 September 2025

In this blog

Invoking agent mode
Asking questions
Some use cases

Agent mode in ChatGPT is like having your own personal robot on hand 24 hours a day:

Agent mode is perfectly suited to answering questions like this (albeit that it can take up to half an hour sometimes to do so).

Invoking agent mode

You can invoke agent mode provided that you have a paid ChatGPT account:

Click on the + symbol to go to agent mode. This shows that I have 29 questions left to ask before my account resets on 14th October.

Your prompt screen will then change to this:

You're now in agent mode!

Asking questions

You ask a question in agent mode in the usual way (although you can also choose to connect to a service that you use like GMail, should you trust OpenAI enough):

Here I want to know if Wise Owl are in the top 5 UK B2B search results!

Initially you'll see this a message like this:

Your query is running in a virtual desktop on an OpenAI computer.

Agent mode then transparently tries to answer your question:

Agent mode will show you what it's doing, while it's doing it.

The best thing to do while this is running is to carry on with something else in another application. If agent mode runs into a block and needs your input, it will pause and ask you to take control.

Some use cases

When would you use agent mode? Here are 3 occasions on which I've found it useful in the last few days:

Business need	Notes
Booking a trip	I wanted to go from Manchester to Amsterdam, and needed to find the cheapest and easiest way. Agent mode was able to create a spreadsheet listing out the details of 6 journeys by car, train and plane, giving the start date/time, end date/time and cost of each.
Buying a fridge part	The milk shelf in our camper van fridge broke, and I was having trouble tracking down the right part. I uploaded a picture of the serial number from inside the fridge and agent mode was able to list 3 suppliers based in the UK (I hadn't been able to do this using Google).
The SEO query above	Asking any question about SEO performance in a standard AI tool is not useful (believe me I've tried). Because agent mode can spend what is (for a computer) a long time researching different possible answers it's allowed me to ask questions about our website performance on Google which I would have otherwise had to spend hours researching manually. Out of interest, by the way, Wise Owl was ranked 4th in the list of the top 5 B2B computer training providers in the UK) by the query above after 7 minutes of research.

I've included much more information on ChatGPT agent mode (along with two case studies) in this agent mode video.

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include: