Is ChatGPT Agent Mode Falling Behind Its Competitors?

Note: This article is based on a hands-on evaluation from July 2025, updated with the latest status as of May 2026.

What it actually feels like to use

When you start a task, ChatGPT Agent Mode first sets up its virtual desktop, and you wait.

After a few minutes, it switches to “thinking.” This stage can drag on too.

Then the summarization tasks finally kick off.

After 37 minutes, the deck is finished.

And here is the slide it produced.

The verdict on real usage (July 2025)

About 40 minutes for a slide that, frankly, isn’t very polished.

You’d get further by combining an AI search tool with Marp — both the speed and the content quality would be better.

Manus has been ahead in this space for a while now, and its slide generation is genuinely impressive. The catch is that Manus is hard to deploy inside a typical company because of its operational and security constraints. So for now, the realistic option is to wait for Agent Mode to keep improving.

Assessment as of July 2025

There’s nothing strikingly new here, and overall it lands below the existing competition. You’ll also feel the friction of repeated permission prompts on tasks that require login. Worse, scheduled task execution was buggy — it didn’t run at the time I specified.

May 2026 update: how things have evolved

About ten months after launch, OpenAI has made significant strides.

Rebranding and integration — “Agent Mode” has been rebranded as ChatGPT agent. The standalone Operator service (operator.chatgpt.com) has been integrated into ChatGPT agent and retired, bringing its browser-automation capabilities directly into the main product.

Wider plan availability — At launch, access was largely limited to Pro subscribers. Since July 2025, it has expanded to Plus, Team (now renamed Business), Enterprise, and Edu plans, making it available to most paid users.

Scheduled tasks, now working properly — The buggy scheduling that plagued the initial release has been resolved. After a task completes, you can set it to repeat daily, weekly, or monthly. All scheduled tasks are managed at chatgpt.com/schedules. Automations like a morning news digest or a weekly summary report are now genuinely practical.

The gap with competitors has narrowed. ChatGPT agent still holds an edge as the enterprise-safe option. Slide quality still has room to grow, but as a tool for automating routine business tasks, it has become meaningfully more capable.