Opera Aims to Bring Agentic AI to the World

The Opera Web browser, first introduced 30 years ago, has over its long tenure helped to pioneer features that would later become commonplace among all Web browsers—including tabs, sync, and built-in search. Opera was among the first to introduce a built-in AI assistant (Aria) as well as the ability to use locally running models with its developer version. Now, Opera aims to be the first to offer a new kind of AI agent–based browsing, with a feature calledBrowser Operator.

AI agents are an emerging trend in artificial intelligence, built around AI-powered assistants that perform extended tasks beyond a single query or command-line action. And many tech observers argue agent-based (or “agentic”) AI will be a big deal in the years ahead.

At the company’s Opera Days event last month, Henrik Lexow, director of product marketing technologies, demonstrated the multifaceted versatility of agentic AI. In one demo, he booked a complicated travel itinerary; in another, he ordered flowers to be delivered to an event attendee.

The Opera browser runs on a range of platforms from high-end gaming devices (Opera GX) to low-end phones (Opera Mini). Mini is Opera’s most popular browser, with nearly 70 million monthly active users in Africa alone, and over 1 billion downloads worldwide from the Google Play Store.

The Global Reach of Opera Mini

Launched 20 years ago in 2005, Opera Mini gave users access to the Internet on lower-end consumer devices, especially feature phones. While the low-end phone marketplace today has expanded to include some smartphones, Internet access limitations and throttled data plans of old are still a going concern around the globe. So Opera Mini continues to combine page compression and snapshotting to reduce the requirements of today’s resource-intensive websites. Instead of loading pages directly from the source, Mini has the option of loading them from a snapshot on Opera’s servers, removing excessive JavaScript or video to render the page more manageable over low-data connections.

Despite the different browser variants, each Opera version is built upon the same core engine. Likewise, the range of Opera browsers’ AI engines all contain many of the same components under the hood. For Opera Mini and its user base, this gives access to AI models that typically need a powerful device to run locally, or have high costs to access as a service. With the forthcoming version 2.0, Aria reportedly will prioritize even more the system’s response speed.

“Everyone gets the same experience,” says Tim Leznik, Opera Mini’s product manager. “Where Aria is available in a particular country, there are no limitations imposed in any way, shape, or form.”

However, patterns differ within user groups and within different countries, says Monika Kurczyńska, Opera’s AI R&D lead. For example, browser usage in Brazil and Nigeria from students peaks during the school year, and then drops off again during school holidays—so much…