OpenAI’s next DevDay is fast approaching, with the event set for the end of September. As tradition dictates, attention is turning to what the company is preparing, and once again, agents are at the center. This time, OpenAI is working on an implementation of Managed Agents that broadly follows what Anthropic currently offers. The company will also likely target businesses with this managed agent experience, in addition to developers.
OpenAI has been trying to build an agent ecosystem for quite a while. The effort began with custom GPTs, followed last year by an agent builder with functionality similar to what n8n offered at the time. In just over a year, that approach has already become obsolete because agent capabilities evolved enough to cover pipelines on their own, without users needing to build connections manually. It was a natural evolution that happened remarkably quickly.
Anthropic has led the pack in this area, although it remains difficult to say whether its managed agents have been super successful. Developers and enterprises use them, yet many users still rely on alternative, cheaper solutions. For OpenAI, a major question is whether it can hit a price point that makes its solution more attractive. The company already provides advanced models with strong computer-use capabilities, which should give it an advantage. Whether that will be enough to reach critical mass remains unclear.
Managed agents will not be the only announcement at DevDay. Model updates, security solutions, and more are also expected. Although access to the agents UI is not available yet, the codebase suggests functionality very similar to Anthropic’s offering, including creating different agents and environments, managing them, and enabling specific skills and plugins.
OpenAI also appears to be preparing demos for business customers. Whether this appears at DevDay or later, the company is working on functionality that would allow ads on ChatGPT to resolve directly to an agent. Rather than seeing a standard informational ad in a response, users would receive a link to an agent that takes the lead and guides them through the process.
These agents are expected to handle conversion funnels, optimizing and customizing them far better than traditional advertising solutions. That might sound minor, but it represents a huge shift and could pose a serious threat to major advertisers such as Meta and Google until they offer their own solutions in this space. It remains speculation, but it is definitely worth watching. Let’s see how it unfolds.
References 👀
- OpenAI's official DevDay site confirms September 29, 2026 at Fort Mason in San Francisco, with a livestreamed keynote and technical sessions, APIs, tools, demos, and workshops.
- OpenAI introduced custom GPTs in November 2023 andAgent Builder in October 2025. A June 2026 update says Agent Builder and Evals are being wound down after November 30, with the Agents SDK and Workspace Agents named as successors.
- Anthropic describes Claude Managed Agents as a hosted service for long-horizon work with sessions, harnesses, sandboxed environments, scoped permissions, managed credentials, audit logs, skills, connectors, plugins, and subagents.
- OpenAI publicly offers ChatGPT Ads and Ads Manager , including campaign goals, links, bidding, and conversion measurement. Its August 2026 update says it will explore more native ways for businesses to interact with consumers.