At the start of 2025, OpenAI released its new Tasks feature in beta, enabling users to automatically schedule tasks with ChatGPT. They can enter natural language inputs instructing the chatbot to run the tasks later.
ChatGPT Tasks is available on ChatGPT web, iOS, Android, and MacOS. The company also has plans to release Tasks for the Windows app at some point in Q1 2025.
The new feature opens the door to more automation options than ever, bringing the world’s largest AI startup closer to its vision of agentic AI, or virtual agents that can perform independently of human guidance.
In this article, we look at how the new feature works and offer five things you can do with OpenAI Tasks to improve your day-to-day life.
Key Takeaways
- In January 2025, OpenAI released Tasks in beta.
- The Tasks feature gives users the ability to automatically schedule tasks with ChatGPT.
- Users can receive task notifications via desktop and email.
- Example use cases include news summaries, meeting reminders, stock performance roundups, and daily workout plans.
How ChatGPT Tasks Works
Today we’re rolling out a beta version of tasks—a new way to ask ChatGPT to do things for you at a future time.
Whether it's one-time reminders or recurring actions, tell ChatGPT what you need and when, and it will automatically take care of it. pic.twitter.com/7lgvsPehHv
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) January 14, 2025
The new Tasks feature can be accessed by clicking on your ChatGPT profile and clicking on the Tasks option. To create a task, simply enter a prompt in natural language, specifying when you want the task to trigger (this can be as a one-time or recurring task).
Basic Tasks prompts you can use include, for example, “Can you give me a briefing on AI news each afternoon? ” ” Practice French with me daily,” and “Remind me about my mom’s birthday.”
Once you’ve created a task, ChatGPT will proceed to execute it whether or not you’re online.
Active tasks can be viewed via the Tasks page on the ChatGPT web app, and you will receive notifications about completed tasks via push notification or email.
Why ChatGPT Tasks Matter
The Tasks feature is an important addition to OpenAI’s ChatGPT functionality because it opens the door to greater workflow automation.
Alon Yamin, CEO and co-founder of Copyleaks, told Techopedia:
“The introduction of ChatGPT’s Tasks feature is yet another milestone in the evolution of AI becoming a comprehensive personal assistant.
“The Tasks feature highlights the growing potential for AI to streamline daily routines, offering users the ability to schedule reminders, automate repetitive tasks, and even integrate these capabilities more seamlessly across devices.”
Current Limitations
It’s worth noting that the feature does have some significant limitations. One of the main restrictions is that Tasks has a limit of 10 active tasks at any time, so you won’t be able to exceed this number.
It also doesn’t currently support voice chats, file uploads, or GPTs.
5 Things You Can Do With OpenAI’s Tasks
1. Summary of the Day’s News
One of the simplest things you can do with ChatGPT’s scheduled tasks is to ask it to give you a summary of the day’s news.
During our testing, we asked ChatGPT to send a summary of the day’s news to our email and received an inbox notification letting us know when the summary was ready.
Clicking on the link gave us a quick rundown of the Israel-Hamas Ceasefire Agreement, Biden’s Farewell address, the US cabinet confirmation hearings, and the stock market surge, alongside links to sources.
We can see this being a highly useful feature for staying on top of the news. Still, we recommend that users fact-check all news stories with a reliable source, as LLMs have a tendency to generate hallucinations.
Example prompt: Give me a daily summary of the day’s news at 9 a.m.
2. Meeting Reminders
Another great way to use ChatGPT is as a meeting reminder tool. You can tell Tasks to give you a daily reminder for an upcoming meeting and receive push notifications and emails notifying you about the event.
While this isn’t as convenient as using a service like Google Calendar, we can still see its relevance for avid ChatGPT users who want to add reminders to their daily usage habits.
3. Stock Market Performance Summary
ChatGPT’s text summarization abilities can also be useful for providing a summary of stock prices. For instance, you could ask Tasks to give you a daily summary of stock prices and tell you if a particular stock went up or down.
Using Tasks in this manner could reduce the need to manually research how the stock market is changing. However, once again, if you use OpenAI’s chatbot to summarize stock prices, you’ll need to fact-check them to ensure that you’re not given any misinformation.
While we’ve opted for a general summary of stock prices, you could also tweak this prompt to give you a summary of a particular stock’s progress.
Example prompt: Give me a daily summary of stock prices at 1 p.m.
4. Daily Newsletter
The Tasks feature also provides some useful capabilities for content creators. For example, if you want to create a newsletter on a topic like AI, you could use ChatGPT Tasks to turn the day-to-day news cycle into a recurring newsletter, with a draft automatically produced in Canvas.
This means a content creator could generate a daily newsletter without having to open ChatGPT and prompt it each time. Still, of course, they’d need to edit and fact-check it to make sure it was useful to their target audience.
Example prompt: Create a daily newsletter on the latest news in AI at 5 p.m.
5. Daily Workout
If you’re getting out of your normal workout routine, you can also turn to Tasks to help you put together a new training plan. ChatGPT Tasks can provide you with a new set of exercises every day.
Try setting a recurring task to get 4-6 exercises across a different body part each day. In our example, we split the workouts across the chest, back, shoulders, legs, and arms.
You could take this further by asking for cardio workouts or splitting workouts between upper and lower body exercises.
Example prompt: Send me a daily training plan of 4-6 exercises to support one of five muscle groups (chest, back, shoulders, legs, and arms).
The Bottom Line
Based on what we’ve seen so far, Tasks has the potential to be a big asset to ChatGPT and OpenAI going forward. Scheduling tasks means that you don’t need to be glued to your desk entering prompts; you can set basic tasks to be carried out automatically.
While the new feature is still a bit rough around the edges, there are a wide range of ways you can use it to improve your day-to-day life and workflows.