The Agent Finally Has a Name

ChatGPT released something this week called Dots. It's their answer to the AI agent race: a virtual machine you can actually talk to that can do things for you while you're away from the computer, using all the context you've already given it.

You just use it inside the ChatGPT app, which means no APIs to configure and no virtual server to spin up.

I’m excited for this one and have been using it every day since it became available. Sure, it probably came out six months later than it should have. But it's here now and I’m excited to have my own agents running 24-7.

Having an agent also checks a task off my “to do” list with AI. For months, my Claude chief of staff had a recurring reminder set for every weekend: spin up a virtual server and get Hermes running. I never did it. I kept thinking to myself, "Do I really want to pay annually for another technology I don't think will be around in three months?" I figured ChatGPT or Claude would ship something like this by summer. It took until fall.

When I started using Dots, the first job was picking a name for my agent. I didn’t want to be generic and call it Jarvis or HAL or Otto like everyone else.

I wasn't sure what to call it, so I asked it to look through the journals I've been writing daily since February and storing in Obsidian, and find a pattern worth naming something after. It landed on Zambra, after a hotel in Spain where my family spent four nights earlier this year. We loved that place. We met some friends there, the kids had a club to run off to, and the whole stay was genuinely top-notch.

Big win for Dots. The agent read months of my life and found a great name for itself.

AI agents have been "the next thing" for a while now, but they mostly required a certain kind of person to set them up. Dots changes that. If you've been waiting for agents to become something a normal person can actually use, the wait is over.

What's the first thing you'd hand an agent to take off your plate? Hit reply and tell me.

Until next Saturday,
Jeff Sauer

P.S. If you want help bringing AI into your organization, or getting better at it yourself, I do 1:1 coaching for exactly that.

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