OpenAI unveils AgentKit that lets developers drag and drop to build AI agents
OpenAI launched an agent builder that the company hopes will eliminate fragmented tools and make it easier for enterprises to utilize OpenAI’s system to create agents. AgentKit, announced during OpenAI’s DevDay in San Francisco, enables developers and enterprises to build agents and add chat capabilities in one place, potentially competing with platforms like Zapier. By offering a more streamlined way to create agents, OpenAI advances further into becoming a full-stack application provider.“Until now, building agents meant juggling fragmented tools—complex orchestration with no versioning, custom connectors, manual eval pipelines, prompt tuning, and weeks of frontend work before launch,” the company said in a blog post. AgentKit includes:Agent Builder, which is a visual canvas where devs can see what they’ve created and versioning multi-agent workflowsConnector Registry is a central area for admins to manage connections across OpenAI products. A Global Admin console will be a prerequisite to using this feature.ChatKit enables users to integrate chat-based agents into their user interfaces. Eventually, OpenAI said it will build a standalone Workflows API and add agent deployment tabs to ChatGPT. OpenAI also expanded evaluation for agents, adding capabilities such as datasets with automated graders and annotations, trace grading that runs end-to-end assessments of workflows, automated prompt optimization, and support for third-party agent measurement tools. Developers can access some features of AgentKit, but OpenAI is gradually rolling out additional features, such as Agent Builder. Currently, Agent Builder is available in beta, while ChatKit and new evaluation capabilities are generally available. Connector Registry “is beginning its beta rollout to some API and ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu users. OpenAI said pricing for AgentKit tools will be included in the standard API model pricing. Agent BuilderTo clarify, many agents are built using OpenAI’s models; however, enterprises often access GPT-5 through other platforms to create their own agents. However, AgentKit brings enterprises more into its ecosystem, ensuring they don’t need to tap other platforms as often. Demonstrated during DevDay, the company stated that Agent Builder is ideal for rapid iteration. It also provides developers with visibility into how the agents are working. During the demo, an OpenAI developer made an agent that reads the DevDay agenda and suggests panels to watch. It took her just under eight minutes. Other model providers saw the importance of offering developer toolkits to build agents to entice enterprises to use more of their tools. Google came out with its Agent Development Kit in April, expanding multi-agent system building “in under 100 lines of code.” Microsoft, which runs the popular agent framework AutoGen, announced it is bringing agent creation to one place with its new Agent Framework.OpenAI customers, such as the fintech company Ramp, stated in a blog post that its teams were able to build a procurement agent in a few hours instead of months. “Agent Builder transformed what once took months of complex orchestration, custom code, and manual optimizations into just a couple of hours. The visual canvas keeps product, legal, and engineering on the same page, slashing iteration cycles by 70% and getting an agent live in two sprints rather than two quarters,” Ramp said. AgentKit’s Connector Registry would also enable enterprises to manage and maintain data across workspaces, consolidating data sources into a single panel that spans both ChatGPT and the API. It will have pre-built connectors to Dropbox, Google Drive, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. It also supports third-party MCP servers. Another capability of Agent Builder is Guardrails, an open-source safety layer that protects against the leakage of personally identifiable information (PII), jailbreaks, and unintended or malicious behavior.Bringing more chat Since most agentic interactions involve chat, it makes sense to simplify the process for developers to set up chat interfaces and connect them with the agents they’ve just built. “Deploying chat UIs for agents can be surprisingly complex—handling streaming responses, managing threads, showing the model thinking and designing engaging in-chat experiences,” OpenAI said. The company said ChatKit makes it simple to embed chat agents on platforms and embed these into apps or websites. However, some OpenAI competitors have begun thinking beyond the chatbot and want to offer agentic interactions that feel more seamless. Google’s asynchronous coding agent, Jules, has introduced a new feature that enables users to interact with the agent through the command-line interface, eliminating the need to open a chat window. Responses The response to AgentKit has mainly been positive, with some developers noting that while it simplifies agent building, it doesn’t mean that everyone can now build agents. Several developers view Agent Kit not as a Zapier killer, but rather as a tool that complements the pipeline. Zapier debuted a no-code tool for building AI agents and bots, called Zapier Central, in 2024.