Tutorial: How to Enable and Use ChatGPT’s New Agent Functionality and Create Reusable Prompts
OpenAI has introduced a major upgrade to ChatGPT’s capabilities: Agent Mode. This feature marks a shift from a simple conversational assistant to a powerful digital agent capable of executing tasks, navigating websites, creating documents, and integrating with real-world apps—all while keeping you in control. Whether you’re a busy professional, a content creator, or someone who simply wants to automate repetitive tasks, this guide will walk you through how to enable Agent Mode, what it can do, and how to create reusable prompts to maximize its power. 1. What Is ChatGPT Agent Mode? Agent Mode allows ChatGPT to go beyond generating text and instead take real actions on your behalf. It can browse the internet, fill out forms, use tools like Google Calendar and Gmail, create presentations, summarize data, and even automate multistep workflows. Think of it as a personal digital assistant that can reason, plan, and execute complex tasks across tools and services. What makes it truly unique is its live narration and transparency. The agent narrates every step it’s about to take, asks for your approval before doing anything sensitive, and gives you full control to interrupt, pause, or take over at any moment. It also has built-in safety features, like Watch Mode, disabled memory during tasks, and prompt-injection defenses, making it secure and user-friendly. 2. How to Enable Agent Mode in ChatGPT If you are a subscriber to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, or Team plans, enabling Agent Mode is easy. Here’s how: Once activated, ChatGPT becomes your agent for that session, ready to receive high-level tasks and carry them out across various tools and services. 3. What Can the Agent Do? With Agent Mode enabled, ChatGPT becomes capable of: Each of these actions is accompanied by a narrated explanation, and the agent pauses for your approval when it’s about to take action, especially if the task involves sensitive data or outputs. 4. Example Use Cases To understand how versatile the Agent Mode is, here are a few practical examples: Creating a Competitor Analysis Slide Deck You might say: “Research three competitors in the marketing automation space and create a presentation that outlines their pricing models, strengths, and recent news.” The agent will search online, extract key insights, organize them into slides, and present you with a downloadable PowerPoint file. You can review and approve the content before it’s finalized. Planning a Themed Dinner Prompt: “Plan a Japanese-style dinner for four. Find recipes, create a shopping list, and simulate placing the ingredients in an online grocery cart.” The agent will gather recipes, list ingredients, and (with your approval) interact with a grocery website to prepare a cart for review. Summarizing Your Week Prompt: “Connect to my Google Calendar, summarize my meetings this week, and include news updates about any companies I met with.” The agent can link to your calendar, extract key events, look up company-related news, and generate a concise summary for your review or presentation. 5. Safety and Control Features Agent Mode is built with user control and safety at its core: You can stop or modify any task at any time during the agent’s workflow. 6. Creating Reusable Prompts with Agent Mode If you have a task you want to repeat regularly—like generating weekly reports or creating a content summary—you can set up reusable prompts using either Custom GPTs or Custom Instructions. Option 1: Use a Custom GPT (Recommended for Pro Users) Custom GPTs are personalized versions of ChatGPT that retain specific instructions and tool configurations. Steps to Create One: Once saved, you can use this GPT anytime with consistent results. It will follow your instructions and use Agent Mode tools appropriately. Option 2: Use Custom Instructions + Manual Agent Activation If you’re not using Custom GPTs, you can still streamline workflows using Custom Instructions. How to Set This Up: Each time you want to run the task, type: “Run weekly workflow” Then activate Agent Mode manually by selecting it from the Tools menu or typing /agent. The assistant will follow the pre-set logic you’ve defined. 7. How Is Agent Mode Different from Search Mode? If you’ve used ChatGPT’s Web Browsing (also called Search Mode) before, you might wonder how it compares to the new Agent Mode. While both can access the internet and retrieve information, their purpose, behavior, and capabilities are quite different. Search Mode: Quick Information Lookup Search Mode is designed for simple tasks that require reading and summarizing web content. When you ask ChatGPT a question, it can’t answer from its training data; it uses browsing to look up the answer in real time. For example, if you ask: “What are the latest headlines about electric vehicles?” ChatGPT in Search Mode will search the web, scan a few sources, and summarize what it finds. That’s the extent of its role: read, summarize, and report. It cannot interact with websites (like clicking buttons or filling out forms), and it doesn’t create files or connect with external apps. Agent Mode: Task Execution and Automation Agent Mode includes everything Search Mode can do—but goes much further. It doesn’t just find information. It can: Let’s compare them with a concrete example: Example: Planning Conference Attendance Search Mode: “What are the top AI conferences in 2025?”→ ChatGPT browses the web and gives you a list. Agent Mode: “Find three top AI conferences for 2025, choose the ones most relevant to AI research, draft a registration email for each, and add them to my calendar.”→ The agent: In short, Search Mode is great for quick research, but Agent Mode is built for workflows and automation. When you want ChatGPT to take initiative, build documents, or operate across multiple tools, Agent Mode is the better choice. You can switch between both depending on the task—but for serious productivity, Agent Mode unlocks a whole new level of capability. 8. How Agent Mode Handles Passwords and App Integrations You Log In — Not the Agent For any integration (like Google Calendar, Gmail, Drive, GitHub, or Slack), you authorize the connection manually through