On Monday, ChatGPT had a developer day where they released a bunch of cool stuff for developers. One of them is another attempt at turning ChatGPT into an AI operating system of sources via an ‘app store’. You may remember ChatGPT’s first attempt at this with ‘custom GPTs’. They were interesting but most of them were things like web search which got walloped by ChatGPT implementing them shortly after custom GPTs.
This time is much better, different and they are bringing in some top brands.
The launch apps are:
It’s pretty cool - the best way to explain it is for you to watch the ~6m video at the top of the post. What you do is ‘at’ via ‘@’ the app (try saying that 10 times fast - at the app, at the app…) and then you chat with it.
What would you talk to Zillow about? Housing. Expedia - trips, Booking - hotel rooms, Spotify - music and so on.
Under the hood it uses MCP and also allows the app to do some interesting things inside the ChatGPT user-experience that you’ll see in the demo.
Ok But…Where’s the Ecommerce?!
Well, this is what piqued my interest→
Now that you’ve seen the demo, imagine what you could do with the target app - you’d want to chat with it about:
Store-level availability
Hey @target what’s my red circle status?
Hey @target do you have any sales going on right now?
Alert me when an @target near me (30miles) has a Switch 2 in stock
In ChatGPT apps that are available, there is no transaction, you ‘pop out’ of the ChatGPT context to book a flight or hotel with Booking/Expedia. But zoom out a bit and think about the Lego blocks they have now:
ChatGPT Apps - Gives partners some key digital real estate, brand recognition and some influence of the discovery process
ChatGPT Instant Checkout - That’s a v1, it can’t do Travel today or Hotels, or even probably checkout a Target order, but in the not-too-distant future, it could.
It’s going to be interesting to see if they connect these two dots, or if they continue on a separate path and don’t interconnect. Stay tuned, we’ll be tracking it
Happy Agentic Commercing!
