Shield hands legacy portal work to GPT-6 Astra agents

Shield's Forge is aimed at the everyday reality of outsourced IT support: technicians spend much of their day inside portals for tickets, devices and software licenses, and many of those systems lack APIs. Before GPT-6 Astra, Forge's agents could get stuck at systems they could not access, leaving customers to wait for a technician to complete that step. Shield had tried computer use with earlier models, but Jain says they were not reliable or fast enough — and he notes that a system without an API is often an old-school system that is hard to use even for a human.

The change is organizational as much as technical. Forge's AI Engineer assigns work to a computer-use agent, and technicians set which actions it can take on its own and where they need to review or approve. Jain describes the result as agents that embody what a technician does by logging into portals and legacy websites, and he says the model felt natural with computer use compared with earlier models that visibly stuttered navigating a UI.

Shield reports faster execution, fewer failures and fewer timeouts, and less time spent writing detailed instructions to an agent or helping it through a task. The company is now testing remote-desktop workflows for more complex desktop actions, which would extend the handoff beyond browser-based portals.