A few years ago, “open the app or website” was the default starting point.
Today, users increasingly state an intent in natural language, and the system orchestrates the right tools on demand.
With Apps inside ChatGPT launched 10/6/2025, that pattern becomes productized. Brands can expose interactive applications directly inside ChatGPT, meeting users at the exact moment of need.
In practice: ChatGPT becomes a unified entry point to services and brands—not just a place to draft content or summarize receipts.
What the User Experiences
Everything begins with conversation.
A user explores a vacation idea; ChatGPT can surface Booking to propose hotels and then TripAdvisor for relevant tours—still within the same chat.
Another user discusses buying an apartment; ChatGPT opens a Zillow app to show listings on an interactive map, while the conversation continues about pros, cons, and trade-offs.
Apps can be invoked by name (“Canva, make a slide deck”), or recommended contextually by ChatGPT when they’re likely to help. The result is a seamless flow: real services and zero tab-hopping.
This inverts the traditional pattern. The brand comes to the user inside the dialogue—not the other way around.
From the Attention Economy to the Intention Economy
Classic digital design optimized for capturing attention. Clicks, visual flair, and time-on-page.
But here come the Apps inside ChatGPT: they optimize for fulfilling intent, quickly and precisely. Utility becomes the competitive axis.
In this model, the apps that are present, relevant, and trustworthy at the right moment win—whether that’s picking a film and launching the player, or navigating a mortgage decision with personalized constraints.
With 800M+ ChatGPT users, the discoverability implications are obvious. If Netflix is present as an app and a competitor isn’t, the latter forfeits a growing share of these intent moments.
Who Should Build an App Presence?
Short answer: anyone providing a service. Users describe an outcome; your app executes it.
Below are concise, industry-specific snapshots.
E-commerce & Retail
- Conversational discovery (“Warm jacket for winter hiking”—The North Face compares materials and thermal ranges).
- Inline configuration and instant checkout.
- Post-purchase care (“How to clean a waterproof shell?”) delivered in-chat from the facturer.
Fintech & Insurance
- Spending optimization via Revolut/Monzo charts inline.
- Intro investment planning; frictionless hand-off to portfolio creation.
- Insurance claims initiation with pre-filled data; user adds only gaps.
Travel & Hospitality
- End-to-end trip planning (Booking/Expedia for stays, TheFork for dining, Uber for transport).
- Contextual rebooking: “push flight 48 hours” from the airline app inside chat.
Foodtech & Delivery
- Mood/diet-aware ordering; fitness data integration for calorie budgets.
- Group orders that reconcile preferences automatically.
Mobility & Transport
- Single conversational layer for ride-hailing, transit, micromobility, and car-share.
- Automated incident reporting and support logging.
Education & Learning
- Path selection (e.g., Coursera) and in-lesson Q&A in one interface.
- Auto-generated quizzes from the active lesson context.
Healthcare & Wellness
- Symptom triage leads to appointment booking.
- Results retrieval leads to medication flows via pharmacy apps.
- Lightweight mental-health journaling and session prep.
Real Estate
- Verbal search to listings on an inline map with validated constraints.
- Mortgage scenarios that adapt to income and rate changes.
B2B Services
- Conversational analytics: import spreadsheet, then prepare chart, then get KPI summary.
- Contracts (NDA, SoW) generated and routed for signature.
- CRM lookups with risk and collection scenarios.
Creativity & Media
- Copywriting+branded visuals (Figma Make) produced in one dialogue.
- Decks compiled from outlines; basic AV edits (e.g., music replacement in a CapCut call).
HR, Productivity & Ops
- “Show my open tasks” (Jira/Asana) with priority suggestions.
- Meeting recaps from Slack chats+Zoom transcripts—you get action items.
- Recruiting via Greenhouse; PTO via Workday; automated onboarding checklists.
Public Services & Infrastructure
- Certificates, tax estimates, local rules (for example, ZTL zones) surfaced conversationally.
Research & Knowledge
- Market scans (McKinsey/Statista), PubMed queries, and Notion exports for case summaries.
Implications for Business
The chat window is becoming a new homepage.
You’ll compete less on traffic capture and more on moment-level usefulness.
What to change:
- Structure your content as data. Your site becomes a source of truth rather than the destination. Ensure product info, pricing, policies, and support content are machine-readable, versioned, and queryable so ChatGPT can interpret and serve them reliably.
- Reframe marketing. Shift from “visit our site” to “tell ChatGPT—our app will handle it”. Position your brand as the executor of tasks, not the generator of clicks.
- Move now. Early partners (Booking, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Spotify, and others) are already instrumenting conversational experiences. As users normalize to “everything inside ChatGPT,” conventional browsing will feel heavier. Early operational learning—data shaping, conversation design, observability—compounds.
Implications for Designers, Researchers, and Engineers
UX begins with a question, not a screen.
Design the flow of the conversation first: how needs are expressed, how the AI interprets them, and how your brand responds.
- Conversation design: intents, turn-taking, error recovery, brand tone.
- Trust design: disclosure, data consent, model fallbacks, helpful defaults.
- Adaptive visualization: maps, charts, configurators that render inline and update as the dialogue evolves.
On the engineering side, treat MCP (Model Context Protocol), APIs, and observability as your new frontend. Instrument logs for prompts, intents, completions, and failure modes; feed that back into product iteration.
The Shortest Playbook: What to Do Now
- Map intent hotspots. Identify the moments where users ask, hesitate, or decide. These are your app’s entry points.
- Upgrade content to data. Normalize, version, and expose key entities (products, pricing, policies, support flows) in structured forms.
- Ship a small, high-value flow. One service, one interaction, one clear outcome. Measure: completion rate, time-to-resolution, follow-on engagement.
Two Notes to Close
Considering everything we’re seeing, it’s hard not to wonder what’s brewing under the hood between Jony Ive—one of the greatest design minds—and Sam Altman—one of the greatest AI minds.
The design center of gravity is moving from visual persuasion to operational clarity and speed. Great design has always pointed that way; the surface is now simply language.
We are stepping into the new AI-native reality—where design literally speaks through conversation.