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ChatGPT will pitch third-party apps mid-chat to its 1.2 billion weekly users
OpenAI says ChatGPT will suggest third-party apps mid-conversation to its 1.2 billion weekly users, who can connect and use them without leaving the chat. Teams that rely on app stores for discovery now face a second storefront where the assistant makes the pick.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- ChatGPT's plugin system now supports extensions, so developers can build interactive panels that users work in while they chat.
- A new Sign in with ChatGPT option lets users bring their ChatGPT identity and their existing AI allowance into third-party apps.
- Developers submitting plugins can now track their review, see what needs fixing, request a human reviewer and update tools without restarting the submission.
- An enterprise OpenAI Marketplace opened with 30-plus partners, including Salesforce, Figma and CrowdStrike, and eligible customers can put part of their OpenAI commitment toward them.
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Why it matters
- cost Vendors outside OpenAI's marketplace now compete for enterprise deals against rivals the buyer can pay for out of money already committed to OpenAI.
- constraint Shipping a ChatGPT extension puts tool updates behind OpenAI's review, a second approval queue for teams that already clear an app store's.
- exposure Because Dots agents can use connected apps from their own cloud computers, a ChatGPT-connected product should expect agent sessions in its usage numbers alongside people.
In OpenAI's DevDay demo, a user with a meeting coming up never leaves ChatGPT. The calendar shows up inside the chat and AI takes the notes. When the meeting wraps, a summary of follow-up items is waiting [7]. The meeting app in that demo was OpenAI's own [7].
Product teams tell themselves users choose software by searching a store and installing the winner. In the flow OpenAI described, the user states a task and ChatGPT proposes an app that could help. The user connects it without leaving the conversation [3]. TechCrunch wrote that OpenAI's push into agents means users "don't have to think as much about which app to use or why" [11].
TechCrunch framed Tuesday's announcements as aimed at the app store model [1], and each piece does match a job a store handles for a product team today. The in-chat suggestion is discovery [3]; Sign in with ChatGPT, live with 16 launch partners, is the account [5][6]; the plugin review queue, which TechCrunch likens to Apple's App Review, is the gate [9].
Payment is the least finished piece. What travels into a partner app is AI capacity the user already has with OpenAI [5], so trying one need not mean a second AI subscription. The report does not say how that usage is settled between OpenAI and the developer, or how ChatGPT ranks the apps it suggests [3][5].
The 2x2 I'd use for a product team has two axes. One is whether the job that brings users to you starts as a sentence typed to an assistant, like the meeting notes in OpenAI's demo or a revision to a Figma or Adobe project [7][8]. The other is whether your revenue depends on owning the user's account and bill.
Where the job starts as a sentence and revenue does not ride on the account, build the extension and take the ChatGPT sign-in, since a user who arrives signed in skips your signup form [5]. Where the job starts as a sentence but the account is the business, the case is for an extension with your own login kept, at the cost of losing some users at that extra step. Jobs that start in a file or a feed can stay with the app store and the web for now, on either side of the account line.
I'd build the extension in both sentence-shaped quadrants. The tradeoff comes in the same step: ChatGPT decides when a partner's app gets suggested [3], and OpenAI is also an app developer in the same chat [7].
What to watch
- Retention figures from launch partners such as Notion or Vercel for users who arrive through Sign in with ChatGPT, compared with their other signup channels.
- Whether Sign in with ChatGPT grows past its 16 launch partners into consumer apps that also sell through mobile app stores.