OpenAI Dots: ChatGPT's Always-On Agent, Singapore Guide

On Tuesday 29 September 2026 OpenAI held its DevDay conference at Fort Mason in San Francisco and announced more than 20 products and features. The headline was Dots, always-on agents that live inside ChatGPT and keep working after you close the window. They run on GPT-6 Astra, the flagship model OpenAI shipped earlier in September.

If you only ever use ChatGPT as a chat box, here is the plain version. A chat ends when you stop typing. A dot does not. You give it a goal, it gets its own cloud computer and browser, and it keeps grinding on that goal: checking the apps you connected, drafting things, coming back to ask you questions or hand over finished work. OpenAI calls it "an extension of you". A fairer description is a junior staffer who never sleeps, and who you still have to supervise.

This is OpenAI catching up rather than inventing. Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok Bot and self-hosted setups like OpenClaw have been running continuously for months. OpenAI's advantage is that Dots sit inside ChatGPT, where 1.2 billion people already are. If you want the broader version of this shift, our earlier guide to self-hosted agents covers the same idea without the subscription.

Every dot gets its own cloud computer and its own browser. Through ChatGPT's plugin system it can reach more than 4,000 apps, and you can talk to it from ChatGPT on desktop, web and mobile, or from Slack and Teams. Texting your dot exists as well, but only as a limited beta for Pro users in the United States, so ignore that part for now.

The examples OpenAI showed are worth reading because they are specific. One early tester's dot noticed he had forgotten to invoice a publication, prepared the invoice, and sent it only after he approved. A developer's dot watches customer feedback, scopes the small fixes, and hands back finished pull requests with videos showing what changed. Dots also run scheduled work, so "every weekday at 7am, tell me what is on my calendar and what needs a decision" is a normal request.

The guardrails matter more than the demos. Custom rules set one of four behaviours for any action: take action without asking, take action only if you pre-approved it in your request, ask before acting, or hand it straight to you. Changing a password or permanently deleting data always stays with you. When you are not actively working with it, its background research is limited to read-only tools, so it can look but cannot send or change anything. There is an Activity View to watch what it did, and a Pause button.

Not everyone, and this is the part that decides whether the rest of this article matters to you.

Dots launched on Pro (all three tiers) and Business Premium. Free, Go, Plus and Business Standard are not eligible. Pro access excludes the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the United Kingdom; Singapore is not on that list, so SG accounts are included. The rollout is gradual and OpenAI says access can take several days to reach your account. Business Premium is available across all supported regions, while Enterprise, Edu and Healthcare workspaces can try a beta that stays off until an admin enables it.

Your first dot is included in the plan at no extra charge. Here is the monthly cost in Singapore dollars at the rate on 1 October 2026 (US$1 is about S$1.28):

• Pro 100: US$100, roughly S$128 a month
• Pro 200: US$200, roughly S$256 a month
• Pro 500: US$500, roughly S$640 a month, the only Pro tier that includes Ultrafast, OpenAI's premium speed tier at 300 tokens per second
• Business Premium: US$125 per user monthly or US$100 per user annually, roughly S$160 or S$128 per user a month, with a two seat minimum on a new workspace

Those are pre-tax US dollar amounts charged to a card, so add your bank's foreign exchange spread. For the first month, dot usage does not count against your plan allowance, and conversations with your dot do not consume normal ChatGPT limits. Tasks it starts inside Codex or ChatGPT Work do count.

One thing to know before you start: you can only create a dot in the ChatGPT desktop app or on desktop web. Mobile can chat with an existing dot once access arrives, but you cannot create one there, and mobile web is not supported at all.

1. Check your plan first. Open Settings, then My Plan. No eligible plan means no Dots.
2. Create it on a computer. Sign in at chatgpt.com and look for Dots in the sidebar.
3. Name it and pick a character. Cosmetic, but naming it shifts your head from "this is a tool" to "this is someone I delegated to".
4. Connect one app, not five. Plugins live under Customize, then Plugins. Start with your calendar and leave anything holding customer or client data until step 5.
5. Write your rules before your first task. Default rules exist and you should read them once. Anything that spends money or messages another person should be set to "ask before taking action" for the first two weeks.
6. Give it something small and checkable. A weekly calendar summary beats "run my business" every time.
7. Watch the first run in Activity View. If it does something you did not want, that is a rules problem, not a model problem. Fix the rule.

Prompting a chatbot is asking a question. Briefing an agent is writing a job description. Five parts do most of the work: the goal, the context it needs, your standards, the boundary it cannot cross, and what it should do when it is unsure. Four briefs and one rule you can copy, written for Singapore situations.

1. Weekly supplier price check for a small F&B or retail business

Goal: every Monday at 9am, give me a one-page supplier price check for my stall.
Context: my main items are chicken, eggs, cooking oil and rice. My two regular wholesalers are listed in the note I uploaded.
Do: check the supplier sites and order platforms I have connected. Note any price change against last week and flag anything up more than 10 per cent.
Standards: under 300 words, table format, prices in SGD, no commentary.
Boundary: do NOT place any order and do NOT contact any supplier. Read only.
If unsure: mark the item "unverified" instead of guessing a price.

2. Chasing overdue invoices as a freelancer

Goal: chase overdue invoices for me every Friday afternoon.
Context: my clients, invoice numbers and payment terms are in the spreadsheet I shared. Standard terms are 30 days from invoice date.
Do: list everything more than 7 days overdue, then draft one reminder email per client and show me the drafts.
Standards: friendly, short, no threats, always include the invoice number, amount and due date.
Boundary: draft only. Do not send anything without my approval.
If unsure: leave that email unsent and tell me what is ambiguous.

3. Comparing renovation quotations

Goal: turn my five renovation quotations into one comparison table.
Context: I am renovating a 4-room resale flat. The quotations are in the PDFs I uploaded.
Do: extract price, scope and exclusions for each firm, flag where the scopes differ, then list the ten questions I should ask each contractor.
Standards: table first, notes second, SGD only. Do not recommend which firm to pick.
Boundary: do not contact any contractor.
If unsure: list it under "need to confirm with contractor".

4. The custom rule that does the real work

Rule for any action involving money, contracts or another person:
- Sending a message, email or Slack reply to anyone outside my workspace: ASK BEFORE TAKING ACTION
- Anything that spends, pays, subscribes or books: ASK BEFORE TAKING ACTION
- Reading, summarising, comparing or drafting: TAKE ACTION WITHOUT ASKING
- Signing, accepting terms, changing passwords, deleting anything: HAND OFF TO ME
Log every completed action in one line, with the reason.

For most people reading this site, no. Dots is the biggest AI announcement of the week and it belongs on your radar, but S$256 a month is a business expense, not something you pick up out of curiosity. If you are on Free, Go or Plus, nothing about Dots changes your week.

Three things to weigh before you decide.

The safety context is not nothing. OpenAI held back its previous flagship release over concerns that it did not reliably stay inside its authorised scope, after a 2026 incident in which AI agents accessed third-party systems without authorisation. Dots is exactly the category of always-on autonomous software those concerns were about. OpenAI's answer is the rules and approvals system above, which is a control, not a guarantee. Review consequential work yourself.

Your workplace policy comes before your curiosity. Connecting a work email or work Slack means your employer's data. Singapore's PDPA still requires an organisation to protect personal data when an agent is doing the handling. Check with whoever runs IT before you connect anything holding a name, NRIC or address, and keep client records out of personal accounts.

There is a cheaper path to most of what people actually want. The rest of what OpenAI announced at DevDay runs on every plan, including free: ChatGPT Space (a shared workspace where you, colleagues and dots work on the same documents), plugin extensions, and MCP Events automations that let ChatGPT watch a project board, read the linked documents and draft a plan while you are away. If your real problem is that things slip through the cracks, a free Space plus one automation may solve it. If you are a Singapore Citizen who has attended an eligible AI course, the SkillsFuture AI Subscription gives you six months of a paid AI tool at no cost, though ChatGPT Plus is on that list, not Pro.

My read: if your work is genuinely a stream of small recurring jobs such as chasing invoices, watching prices and triaging email, S$256 a month is about the cost of four hours of part-time help, and a one-month test is defensible. If you are just curious about agents, install a free one first and keep the money.