Clouds to Clay: The 1 minute download.
OpenAI’s Operator is here, is 2025 the year to double down, not so fast. I spent a day pushing it. The hype is real, but the tech still has kinks to work out. Smart teams will experiment now, so they’re ready when agents truly take off.
The Big Idea: Every step you take on a computer with your keyboard or mouse can now be replicated. OpenAI’s Operator automates tasks by navigating software like a human. It’s far from perfect.
The Timeline: 12-24 months until we get to some meaningful adoption. Teams experimenting now will be miles ahead when this tech matures. Google isn't far behind with Project Mariner (check the video here).
The Impact: You and your team spend hours - clicking from tab to tab, copying, and pasting bouncing from tool to tool, image giving Operator an end state, and letting it do all the middle work.
Early lessons: Operator is still finicky. Watch bot traffic, login security, and always watch what it is doing when in your accounts.
What do I do now: Start indexing how much of any job is “moving” vs “interpreting” data. Get 1 person on your team to test it and share whats possible today, and pass along everything below to see what we learned and save them some time.
The Deep Dive: A reflection on a day with Open AI' s Operator
The big picture: OpenAI’s Operator is an automation tool that navigates software like a human—clicking, scrolling, and extracting data.
Let’s take a daily marketing task: I want to get all the replies to a LinkedIn post that recently did very well and send the questions to a team member to answer.
The old way:
- Log into LinkedIn
- Find the post (avoid all the distracting things LinkedIn wants you to click on)
- Scroll to all comments
- Read every comment
- Think about each comment and whether to send it to be answered or not
- Find an answer that passes the sniff test
- Open Email, or Google sheet
- Paste in the question
- Scroll back to comments, read them, find the next one
- Alt-Tab back to Google Sheet
- Do this for 50 comments, reading, deciding, copy and paste the good one
- Email doc to teammate
The new way:
- Open Operator & Log into LinkedIn
- Prompt operator with a prompt like the following:
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How did it work: I did that in 10 minutes, opened my second screen, and watched it do the work, yes it got stuck once and got close to replying to someone, but it did the task. Now I can refine this to give it ANY LinkedIn URL in the future so we get back to those spicy comments faster, the human value was never in the copying and pasting of URLs and reading every, single comment, counting the engagement per comment, etc. It is in getting back to people who challenge your thinking.
The takeaway: AI isn’t replacing strategy, but it will make many tedious tasks within marketing obsolete.
6 things to keep in mind for your first test:
What we saw: Operator is powerful but finicky in its current state. If you’re testing AI agents for marketing tasks, keep these in mind:
- Simple layouts win. An earlier test I ran to automate pinging team members when they had upcoming tasks struggled because of the UX/UI with all the dropdowns, hidden fields, nested subtasks, etc - that confused the AI. Tools with complex UX and UI like Hubspot have a lot of navigation when you login, so generic prompts might not work as well in operator - but you can create simpler charts to make it easier.
- Give it direct URLs - Lets say you want Operator to search for your last email campaign performance, you could tell it to login to hubspot and find your last email marketing campaign your email for client names… you can tell it to do that, and it should work. I would say send it to the direct URL of the email performance report which will give it directly where to go and not have it rely on navigation items and try to find it.
- Start with micro-actions - like pulling a single data point or emailing one person, before layering complexity. When I was showing Operator’s automations internally to teammates, once this thing did one thing right, we would instantly hear “have it do this next”…try to keep your tasks simple. Revel in the basics that now can be done for you, the more complexity you layer in the higher your fail rate.
- Don’t trust, always verify. Always confirm the AI "sees" what you see before letting it run loose. I’ve seen it miss a due date and nail other complex tasks. For instance, have it count something you can see on its screen, have it do a little math on that count, and you gotta find where it fails. I always open Operator on a second screen and I watch it. I just saw it try to reply to someone on LinkedIn instead of just copying and pasting their comment (ouch).
- Security first. Treat Operator like a public computer at FedEx. When you are done — log out, use 2FA, and monitor actions closely. I do feel like OpenAI is using the same terminal because once when I logged back in a day or two later it had “remembered” my email for the Google login, I had logged out, but that was interesting.
- Bot traffic could surge. Expect AI-driven tools like Operator to inflate analytics with non-human visits. Start tracking those bots now.
You know those companies where you can get paid to fill out surveys? A New York Times columnist did just that, with Operator. Think about the downstream effect of that. Somewhere, a business owner may be making decisions based on that survey data. It’s a new world, we’ll need a really good sniff test for the integrity of our insights.
The real impact: Marketers spend too much time bouncing between tools—grabbing data from one place, updating another. Operator shows how AI can eliminate manual busywork so teams can focus on strategy, creativity, and decision-making, the question is can people shake themselves out of checkbox work to strategy work in a way that drives meaningful value.
The Post-Operator Mindset shift:
We had a post that did well, and I wanted us to get back to our commenters, I could have hit up Slack, tapped my marketing team, explained the task, and had them to all that work, but I just put in a prompt and let it run.
It's an out of body experience: Operator will force you to be real honest with yourself:
You will see it doing things that you do, but it is like an out of body experience. You see it doing it all, and you realize that something as small as 1 LinkedIn comment, is a series of 5 clicks and steps. The value is the comment back, not in the sorting through the 10 posts that didn’t have a question or the copying and pasting.
I tested it on my project management tool / agency ops tool and that was a fail. Our next test will be onboarding new employees, we manually set up their calendars and we think there might be a better way.
My big ah-ha moment was when I realized how much of my day is moving data, open tool, run query, get insights, export data, import data, format in excel, build pivot table, etc etc.
