OpenAI Dots: a 10-step guide to a 24/7 AI company
A 10-step summary of using OpenAI Dots to run assistants as always-on employees: one job per agent, a chief of staff, real tools, and human approval at key points.
OPENAI DOTS = A 24/7 AI COMPANY IN A BOX @monokern wrote a great article on how to make the most of it. Here are 10 steps summary Step 1 → Don't build chatbots. Build persistent workers with their own cloud computer, browser, terminal, files, memory and schedules. They keep working after you close the laptop. Step 2 → Give every agent one job. A clear responsibility, clear sources, clear working rules and a clear point where human approval is required. Step 3 → Appoint a Chief of Staff. One Dot receives your objective, breaks it into tasks, delegates to specialists, checks the work and assembles the final output. Step 4 → Remove yourself from agent handoffs. Workers should receive only the context and tools they need, execute independently and report back to the orchestrator. Step 5 → Give them real tools. Connect Slack, Teams, Google Workspace, dashboards, APIs and authenticated browser sessions. Without tools, they're still just conversational agents. Step 6 → Make workflows persistent. Use schedules and triggers so monitoring, research, reporting and operational checks happen without anyone manually starting them. Step 7 → Keep humans around the irreversible stuff. Agents can read, research, analyze and draft. Sending, publishing, spending or changing important records should require approval. Step 8 → Don't waste frontier models on everything. Use the smartest model for orchestration and difficult judgment calls, then cheaper models for high-volume background work. Step 9 → Give the whole team shared memory. Keep project specs, decisions, pricing, approved claims and requirements in one persistent workspace. Step 10 → Close the business loop. Signal → research → outreach → execution → measurement → next action. That’s where Dots gets really interesting. You're no longer prompting AI one task at a time, you're designing a system that keeps operating after you log off. bookmark this piece from @monokern ↓
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