OpenAI Launches Pulse, A Personal AI Assistant That Plans Your Day

It’s not far-fetched anymore to think of waking up and having an AI assistant quietly organising your day before you even pour that first cup of coffee. For years, the idea of a personal digital helper felt like a marketing promise from the likes of Siri or Alexa. Now, OpenAI wants to turn that into something more ambitious with a new feature called Pulse.

Pulse is designed to pull together snippets of your life, calendar events, emails, past chats, even connected apps, and package them into a daily digest. Think of it like a personalised briefing that blends your work meetings with your grocery list and a quick rundown of the markets. Unlike the reactive ChatGPT we’ve been used to, this one is proactive, showing up with suggestions before you even ask.

The ambition is clear. Until now, ChatGPT has been mainly about answers on demand. With Pulse, OpenAI is stepping into the territory of news roundups, lifestyle planning, and productivity tools, brushing shoulders with Apple News, newsletters, and even old-school personal assistants like Google Assistant. The difference is that Pulse doesn’t try to keep you scrolling; it gives you a set of reports and then tells you that’s enough for the day.

But this kind of personalised service comes with a heavy price tag, not just for users but for OpenAI itself. Pulse requires enormous computing power to scan, sort, and generate tailored updates. That’s why OpenAI says it’s launching only for those on the $200-a-month Pro plan, at least for now. It’s a reminder that beneath the polished experience sits a very real bottleneck: servers, GPUs, and the cost of running them.

For users, the question becomes whether Pulse feels like a genuine step toward an AI that actively helps manage life, or just another premium add-on. And for OpenAI, the stakes are even higher. If Pulse works, it sets the stage for ChatGPT to evolve from a clever chatbot into a personal agent that could one day completely take over restaurant bookings or draft your emails. If it doesn’t, it risks being remembered as another experimental feature that fell short under the weight of its own ambition.

Either way, Pulse is a glimpse of where AI is heading, from answering our questions to anticipating our needs.

OpenAI wants to now focus on building AI that serves everyone, not just investors

But, the move could have implications for the massive funding SoftBank recently pledged.

TechloyLouis Eriakha