The rise of browser-use agents: Why Convergence’s Proxy is beating OpenAI’s Operator
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Summary
According to a report by VentureBeat, a growing number of AI-powered browser-use agents are emerging, promising to transform the way in which enterprises interact with the web.
These agents are able to autonomously navigate websites, retrieve information and even complete transactions, but the report identifies a number of challenges related to reasoning capabilities and performance, stating that the real test will be in practical usage for real-world cases.
Key players in this space currently include OpenAI, Convergence, Microsoft, ByteDance, Anthropic and Google, among others, with Operator and Proxy the most advanced in terms of being consumer-friendly and out-of-the-box ready.
The report identifies a number of tasks that these agents are able to perform, from finding and summarising the five most popular VentureBeat stories, to booking restaurant reservations and buying game tickets, and suggests that businesses are having to pay for virtual assistants operated by real people to handle basic web research and data gathering tasks, and that these browser-use agents could transform that equation.