Welcome, humans.

Ever wished you had an AI assistant that could actually do your work, not just chat about it? OpenAI's new Operator tool might be exactly that—so we tested it out on real sales workflows to find out.

In case you missed it, Operator is OpenAI’s browser agent. Here's how it works:

Tell Operator to research a company, and your browser (safely nested inside your ChatGPT window) starts moving automatically—opening LinkedIn tabs, checking press releases, and digging through data sources. It shows its work in real-time and can even handle CAPTCHAs with a little human help.

It’s both fascinating AND unsettling. It feels like watching a real person work (seriously, if this is secretly humans pretending to be AI, à la Theranos... well played, OpenAI):

Here are the five most powerful ways sales teams can use Operator, with real results from our testing:

1. Competitive Analysis (highest value, most impressive results).

2. Lead Research (most immediately useful).

3. Sales Collateral Prep (unique value-add).

4. Market Intelligence (leverages Operator's browsing ability well).

5. Meeting Scheduling (most time-saving).

The most impressive test? Competitive pricing research. We watched Operator methodically document features and costs across multiple sites. When it hit barriers, it politely asked for help, then picked up right where it left off—just like a human would.

We’ll also share five use-cases we tried that we DON’T recommend you use Operator for—and why.

A few disclaimers before we start: We’re not saying Operator is the best tool to use for any of these use-cases… we just wanted to test how it performs for each.

We’re also not saying these are the best prompts to use for each task… these are just the ones we tested. Use at your own discretion and follow OpenAI’s guidelines!

Last thing: At the end of this deep dive, we want to hear from you… what prompts do YOU want to use Operator for? Share your feedback in the poll at the end!

1. Competitive Analysis

Here's the most effective prompt we tested:

This is where Operator truly shines. It methodically documents features and creates detailed comparisons—like having a thorough coworker who double-checks everything.

That said, we still had it check its work for hallucinations once it was done—just to be safe.

Pro tip: Have it create tables directly in chat instead of asking it to create a spreadsheet—when it’s asked to create a spreadsheet, it has to take time Googling “free spreadsheet no login” with varied results.

2. Lead research

The winning prompt:

This one was trickier than expected, but taught us an important lesson about keeping Operator on track.

Our first attempt went off the rails after we took over to fill in a CAPTCHA. Operator spent 15 minutes gathering data, but completely lost track of its mission, giving us generic company profiles instead of qualified leads.

The fix? Every time Operator handed control back to us, we needed to explicitly restate:

1. Which source we were checking.

2. What specifically we were looking for.

3. Which companies we'd already found.

Also, every time you test an Operator prompt, make notes of the key details to include the next time you run it so every attempt gets closer to your goal.

While this works well for one prospects, it’s NOT ideal for “set it and forget it” prospecting operations. It just takes too long.

Better would be to take a variation of the same prompt and run it through Gemini Deep Research for a more wide ranging report. Far less manual process, but results may vary.

Pro tip: Be specific about what sources you want checked. We found it works best when you list exact places to look, rather than letting it decide.

Here’s another one, specific for an individual - we tested ours on Satya Nadella and it worked pretty well!

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3. Sales Collateral Prep

The prompt:

Operator excels at organizing and categorizing content by industry. While it can't download content (for good reason), it efficiently provides direct links and summaries of public materials—just remember to prompt it to do so.

4. Market Intelligence

The prompt:

Think of Operator as your personal industry news curator. While it can't access paywalled content (unless you give it your logins), it's surprisingly thorough with public information aggregation. But be warned… it could take some time.

Pro tip: if you catch Operator taking too long on a certain step, prompt it to move ahead to the next step. If you’re not sure it’s learned anything yet, ask it for a progress report.

BE ADVISED: When you give Operator your logins, it has them in every subsequent Operator chat convo you open going forward, so if you want to be extra careful, remember to take back control at the end and log out at the end of every session.

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5. Virtual Meeting Scheduling

The prompt:

This worked surprisingly well for complex scheduling scenarios, especially across time zones. While you may not want Operator to send the actual invites, it excels at finding available slots across multiple time options, creating the events, and drafting professional scheduling emails. You just have to give it access to your calendar.

Pro tip: Give it specific time ranges like “Tuesday-Thursday between 9am-2pm ET” for best results.

5 other potential use cases we tried (that failed):

We also tried the below, but we don’t recommend replacing these tasks with Operator in your current sales workflow just yet—here’s why:

• Event Follow-up: Operator could be great for personalizing connection requests after an event, but is currently too slow for large attendee lists.

• CRM Updates: Operator’s good for formatting notes, but requires too much manual verification to be truly efficient atm.

• Sales Email Writing: Operator can help with researching leads to personalize emails, but standard AI internet search tools (SearchGPT, Perplexity) work just as well for this.

• Lead Prospecting: The thoroughness is impressive but the time investment makes it impractical for bulk research

• Sales Territory Mapping: Operator can be strong for regional research eventually, but requires too many manual verifications to be truly efficient atm.

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Final thoughts

Operator is powerful… a powerful start, anyway. It can do a lot of things, and if you give it access to all your logins and accounts, it can do even more.

That sound scary? It is. But at some point, you’ll need to give in and trust the AI for it to be actually useful… Until then, emphasize it to use free resources and public databases.

While it might not be faster for every task yet, the real value is in being able to multitask—you can watch Operator do research while you focus on higher-value work. Just don't forget to fact-check its findings.

In sum, Operator requires a lot of trust.. AND patience… but we definitely recommend trying it out and learning as much as you can. As they say in the AI industry… this is as bad as it’s ever going to be…