During its recent developer conference, OpenAI highlighted a suite of announcements that together signal a strategic push against the classic app-store paradigm. While the headline features were its new autonomous agents called Dots and upgraded AI models, the broader narrative frames ChatGPT as a hub where software can be found, launched, and operated, leveraging its reported 1.2 billion weekly users.
The company said ChatGPT will now surface relevant applications within a conversation whenever it detects that a third-party tool could help complete a user’s task. Users can then link the suggested app and interact with it directly inside the chat window. This capability is reinforced by an expanded plugin architecture that now supports extensions, enabling developers to embed interactive panels alongside the dialogue.
Live demonstrations illustrated the concept: a native meeting app displayed upcoming calendar events inside ChatGPT, letting users invoke AI-generated notes and receive post-meeting action items. Design-focused services such as Figma and Adobe were shown handling project revisions without leaving the chat interface. The resulting experiences can be shared through lightweight web pages that ChatGPT generates, where collaborators sign in with their own credentials for a personalized view.
OpenAI also refined the plugin-submission workflow, which it likens to its version of Apple’s App Review process. Developers will be able to monitor review status, address flagged issues, request human evaluation, and push updates without restarting the entire submission. Alongside these tools, an enterprise marketplace debuted with more than thirty partners,including Adobe, Figma, HubSpot, Salesforce, and ServiceNow,allowing eligible customers to apply part of their OpenAI commitment toward approved partner solutions.
The newly introduced Dots agents operate as autonomous cloud-based workers, each equipped with its own virtual computer and browser. They can invoke connected applications from OpenAI’s growing catalog of over 4,000 apps, performing tasks such as web navigation or data extraction. Agents may act proactively, offering assistance on projects or flagging forgotten tasks, but only after receiving explicit user consent and operating in a read-only mode when accessing external tools.
OpenAI did not reveal any immediate plans for a billing or revenue-sharing framework comparable to traditional app stores. Instead, the focus remained on building the discovery, distribution, and interface layers, adding an identity component that lets users carry their ChatGPT profile across services, and a mechanism for sharing existing AI usage allowances within third-party applications.