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OpenAI has unleashed a wave of releases, spanning frontier reasoning models to best practices in agent design, use case discovery, and AI adoption, grounded in insights from 300 implementations and over 2M business users.

Since the previous edition, we've reviewed hundreds of the latest agentic and gen AI best practices, case studies, and innovation insights. Here’s the top 1%...

In today’s edition:

• OpenAI’s practical guide to building agents.

• Introducing OpenAI o3 and o4-mini.

• Meta: Enabling field engineering with agents.

• How OpenAI identifies enterprise AI use cases.

• Transformation and technology in the news.

• Career opportunities & events.

Read time: 4 minutes.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

OpenAI’s practical guide to building agents

Brief: OpenAI published a 34-page guide to building AI agents, drawing on insights from its customer deployments. It covers opportunity identification, agent design, and best practices for ensuring safe and effective performance.

Breakdown:

• Advances in reasoning, multimodality, and tool use have led to LLM-powered agents, systems that independently perform tasks.

• OpenAI recommends use cases once resistant to automation due to complex decisions, brittle rules, or heavy reliance on unstructured data.

• At its core, an agent has three components: model, tools, and instructions. It requires three types of tools: data, action, and orchestration.

• Orchestration: single-agent and multi-agent systems with Manager (agents as tools) and Decentralized (agents handing off to agents) patterns.

• Set up guardrails to address identified use case risks, as shown in the diagram above, and add more as new vulnerabilities are discovered.

Why it’s important: Agents mark a new era in automation, where systems can reason through ambiguity, take action across tools, and handle multi step tasks with a high degree of autonomy. This guide offers the foundational knowledge to start delivering enterprise value with agents.

INNOVATION INSIGHT

OpenAI introduces o3 and o4-mini

Brief: OpenAI released o3 and o4-mini, its most advanced reasoning models yet, with seamless access to all ChatGPT tools within reasoning and the ability to "think with images,” alongside the launch of an open-source coding agent.

Breakdown:

• OpenAI o3 is the new top-tier reasoning model, setting state-of-the-art performance across math, science, code, and multimodal benchmarks.

• o4-mini delivers fast, cost-efficient reasoning, outperforming prior mini models and excelling on math benchmarks like AIME 2025.

• Both models can use all ChatGPT tools (web search, Python, image generation, etc.) and combine them to solve complex problems.

• Codex CLI is a lightweight open-source coding agent that runs locally, built to maximize reasoning with models like o3 and o4-mini.

• o3 and o4-mini are live via API and for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users. Enterprise and Edu users will get access starting next week.

Why it’s important: OpenAI's o3 and o4-mini models mark a leap not just in performance, but in how tools are built into agentic reasoning. The models autonomously select and apply tools to solve problems, already showing promise in business tasks like data analysis and presentation creation.

CASE STUDY

Meta: Enabling field engineering with agents

Brief: Meta shared how Aitomatic, which transforms industrial expertise into AI agents, built a Llama-powered Domain-Expert Agent (DXA) to provide expert guidance to field engineers at an integrated circuit (IC) manufacturer.

Breakdown:

• The IC producer faced support issues as field engineers struggled to access specialized knowledge, causing delays and inconsistent service.

• Aitomatic built a Llama 3.1 70B-powered DXA to capture and scale expert knowledge. Llama was chosen for its customizability and versatility.

• DXA development involved capturing expert knowledge, augmenting with synthetic data to expand scenario coverage, and deployment.

• The firm anticipates 3x faster issue resolution and a 75% first-attempt success rate, up from 15–20%, with its newly deployed DXA.

• With the DXA's efficacy, Aitomatic aims to enable the development of further DXAs, potentially automating the IC design process itself.

Why it’s important: Field engineers now handle customer inquiries with greater speed and independence from senior staff. Using open-source Llama, the IC design firm retains full ownership of its DXA, trained on sensitive, company-specific knowledge, eliminating dependency on proprietary AI models.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

How OpenAI identifies enterprise AI use cases

Brief: OpenAI published a 34-page guide to help enterprises identify use cases that deliver value, featuring practical checklists and backed by insights from 300 of its most successful implementations and 2M+ business users.

Breakdown:

• Start by targeting common workplace challenges: repetitive low-value tasks, skill bottlenecks, and processes involving ambiguity.

• Teach employees "primitives of AI use cases" to accelerate discovery: content creation, research, coding, data analysis, ideation and automation.

• For each primitive, OpenAI shares common starting use cases, along with customer case studies and practical checklists.

• Leverage a value/effort framework to prioritize high-impact, department-specific use cases that drive value and are feasible to implement.

• OpenAI highlights a high-value, low-effort example: Tinder built a GPT for prototyping, testing, and debugging, no coding required.

Why it’s important: OpenAI brings firsthand insight into what drives successful enterprise AI. Its approach is grounded in practical, proven wins. Yet achieving success requires more than just selecting the right use cases. In a separate 24-page guide, OpenAI distills seven AI adoption lessons from frontier firms.

Bain shared what executives need to know about humanoid robots as gen AI, falling costs, and dexterity gains put them on a fast track to adoption.

Gartner shared an 11-page EU AI Act checklist. With enforcement looming, legal, risk, and audit leaders must start ensuring compliance.

BCG's Global AI Lead, Nicolas De Bellefonds, unpacked the myths, challenges, and potential of AI agents to transform work if companies stop chasing shortcuts.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said gen AI will “reinvent virtually every customer experience,” in his latest shareholder letter to investors.

BCG explores how enterprises can capitalize on the AI opportunity in procurement to address cost pressures from factors such as inflation.

Microsoft and Forrester created a readiness tool to help firms assess low-code maturity, as well as their data, security, and governance preparedness.

Bain investigates how the marketing funnel is being upended as buyers increasingly turn to AI for product recommendations, comparisons, and research.

Deloitte executive says consultants need to be "technologists and engineers first," and "consultants second" amid AI disruption.

Google rolled out Gemini 2.5 Flash in preview in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, a model that rivals o4-mini and adds a ‘thinking budget’ for cost/quality.

OpenAI is reportedly in talks to purchase Windsurf (formerly Codeium) for $3B. They considered acquiring Cursor’s creator Anysphere before switching focus.

Microsoft added 'computer use' to Copilot Studio, letting users build AI agents that can directly operate websites and desktop applications.

OpenAI released GPT-4.1, an API-only model built for developers featuring major improvements in coding, and the ability to process up to 1M tokens of context.

Anthropic is reportedly preparing to launch a Claude voice mode with three AI voices: Airy, Mellow, and Buttery.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the company plans to release an open-source model that would be "near the frontier.”

NVIDIA launched its first U.S. AI manufacturing effort, teaming up with TSMC, Foxconn & others to produce chips and supercomputers in Arizona and Texas.

OpenAI is reportedly building a social platform, leveraging ChatGPT's 800 million weekly active users to take on social media platforms like X and Meta.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Microsoft - Responsible AI Director

Citi - Gen AI Innovation Director

Gartner - AI Innovation Director

EVENTS

MIT - Decentralized AI Summit - April 14-16, 2025

FirsthandVC - AI Agent Conference - May 6-7, 2025

Everest - AI Amid Tariff Turbulence - June 3, 2025

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