With the launch tonight of ChatGPT Apps, OpenAI is transforming its assistant into an integrated application platform. Brands can now be invoked directly in the conversation thread, without the user leaving the interface. A disruption that redistributes the digital marketing cards.
OpenAI has reached a major milestone and created a historic breakthrough, ChatGPT is no longer just a conversational assistant but becomes a software platform capable of orchestrating actions, services and transactions within the same interface. A search engine, an App Store and an operating system merged into a single conversational environment.
The user makes a request, ChatGPT activates the appropriate application and executes the task. Need a hotel in Lisbon? Booking is displayed with availability. A presentation to prepare? Canva generates the structure. A playlist for running? Spotify is taking over. All without changing interface, without clicking, without navigating.
This development marks the emergence of a new standard where conversation becomes the interface and where brands are no longer consulted but reported directly by the model. This shift from the direct link to an algorithmic intermediary will profoundly change the governance of customer relations.
Language as a universal interface
ChatGPT Apps transform the assistant into a conversational operating system. Brands can integrate their services in the form of mini-applications that are activated directly in the discussion thread.
The logic is reminiscent of Apple when it launched the App Store in 2008. Where Apple connected apps to fingers, OpenAI connects them to words. ChatGPT no longer wants to be one app among others, but the cognitive layer that connects all the others.
It also recalls that of Google which transformed the web into a hierarchical space of results, when with ChatGPT the user no longer clicks, he formulates an intention and the search becomes execution.
The attention economy gives way to the utility economy
This shift will shake up the rules of digital marketing. For twenty years, brands have fought to capture attention: SEO, display advertising, social media. In the ChatGPT ecosystem, brands will compete to be selected by the model at the moment the user expresses an intention. Talking about travel calls up Booking, looking for an active Carrefour or Deliveroo recipe, talking about a layout brings up Ikea.
The marketing objective is no longer to occupy the mental space, but the moment of use. This is the end of classic SEO, brands will no longer position themselves on keywords, but on conversational contexts.
Marketing enters the age of proof
To be called by the model, a brand will have to prove its reliability through the clarity of its data, the quality of its service and the consistency of its information. Especially since ChatGPT will model its responses based on the behavioral data that it will accumulate in the database.
If brands will lose their narrative space, they will gain a new space of expression that of use. A brand no longer exists because it tells a good story, but because it achieves customer satisfaction.
Data becomes the raw material of discourse
To be understood and mobilized by conversational AI, brands will have to structure their knowledge.
The information must be accurate, standardized, connected via API, and expressed in a language that models understand. communication becomes a technical asset, content is no longer designed to seduce a reader, but to train an AI. Each word, each product sheet, each description must be able to be read, interpreted and reformulated by the model. Marketing will have to align with machine language.
The first to settle down redefine the rules
Booking, Canva, Spotify, Coursera: the first brands to integrate ChatGPT are already testing this new service.
OpenAI imposes strict rules: no unsolicited promotional content, no complex multi-step tunnels, no advertising. Acceptable use cases are to book a trip, order a meal, check availability, track a delivery. Simple conversational tasks, limited in time, summarized in a clear action.
The constraints are also technical, two actions maximum per card, no deep navigation, respect for system palettes. Exit the click rate or the time spent, the KPIs are reinvented, make way for the selection rate by the model, the action completion rate, and post-task satisfaction.
A risky bet for brands
Integration into ChatGPT represents a cost with the development of a dedicated app, compliance with strict guidelines, ongoing maintenance. It also creates a new dependence, which determines the criteria for choosing the model? How to ensure its neutrality? What happens to the excluded brands?
But the cost of absence could prove higher and it remains to be seen how brands will integrate this change into their strategy: one channel among others, or as the new central access point to their customers.
OpenAI’s announcement is not a simple product update, but the rewriting the contract between brands, users and platforms. The future will tell how brands will play the game and how marketing will be able to reinvent itself in the light of this new conversational order.
