Member-only story
OpenAI DevDay 2026 Recap: My Honest Take as a Product Manager
OpenAI held DevDay 2026 on September 29 and announced more than 20 things in one go. By the evening my feeds were full of lists. Most of them repeated the press release with a few adjectives on top.
I wanted to write something different. I work as a product manager in ecommerce, and most of my week goes into search, discovery and working out where AI actually earns its place in a product. So this is my read on the announcements I think will change how teams like mine build, plus a few that I think are getting more attention than they deserve.
The short version
If you can only read one paragraph, read this one. DevDay 2026 was about AI that keeps working after you close your laptop, or your computer. OpenAI launched always on agents called dots, a cheaper model called GPT 6.1 Sol that it says comes close to its top model, computer use in the Agents API, and a way for developers to build real product surfaces inside ChatGPT. OpenAI says its products now reach 1.2 billion people every week.
The announcements
OpenAI’s own list is long. These are the ones I would put in front of a product team, roughly in order of how much I think they matter.
- Dots: Agents that run on their own cloud computer…
