OpenAI has made its Decisions API generally available for bounded choices such as classification, routing and action selection. The company positions the service as a way to obtain structured decisions with defined options rather than free-form text. OpenAI claims it can be up to ten times faster than using the Responses API for comparable tasks; that benchmark is a vendor claim and will vary by workload.
For regulated workflows, the architectural separation is noteworthy. A system can use generative models for context and drafting while reserving a narrower, policy-constrained component for the point at which an action is selected. That does not make the decision safe by default. Enterprises still need calibrated thresholds, fallback rules, human approval where required, monitoring for drift and an audit trail that connects the available options to the chosen outcome.
