OpenAI's New Tool Automatically Sorts Your Data
This could save you hours of manual sorting and help you avoid costly mistakes.
Haystack adds three new components that use the OpenAI Decisions API to choose how to handle data without instructions: OpenAIDecisionsTextRouter sends text to a named output per label, OpenAIDecisionsImageRouter does the same for images and can send low-confidence decisions to a fallback branch, and OpenAIDecisionsDocumentClassifier answers choice, score, and yes/no questions about documents and stores the answers in their metadata.
Also new: the StructuredOutputHook validates an Agent's final reply against a Pydantic model or JSON schema and returns it as a dict in result["structured_output"], sending validation errors back to the model to retry up to max_retries times. Document gains a multivector_embedding field for late-interaction models such as ColBERT, and the new MaxSimRanker reranks candidates by comparing each query vector to the document vectors and summing the best matches.
OpenAIChatGenerator, OpenAIResponsesChatGenerator, and the LLM-based evaluators now default to gpt-5.6-terra, the replacement OpenAI recommends for gpt-5-mini, which OpenAI shuts down on December 11, 2026. Pipelines saved with model: gpt-5-mini keep using it, so their YAML should be updated before then. The minimum supported openai SDK version rises from 2.6.0 to 3.26.0 to support the Decisions API.
- OpenAI's new Decisions API lets AI automatically sort and route data without explicit instructions, saving time and reducing errors.
- The update includes a structured output feature that makes AI responses more reliable by enforcing a specific format.
- The default OpenAI model in Haystack has changed to gpt-5.6-terra, and the old model will be shut down in December 2026, so users need to update their pipelines.
Why It Matters
Smarter automation in apps means less manual work and fewer mistakes for you.