Just days after partnering with Shopify to enable direct shopping inside ChatGPT, OpenAI unveiled a sweeping expansion of its in-chat app ecosystem, a move that quietly redefines how users discover, decide, and buy online.

This latest rollout brings Booking.com, Figma, Zillow, Expedia, Canva, Coursera, and Spotify directly into ChatGPT [1]. Later this year, a second wave will follow with AllTrails, DoorDash, Khan Academy, Instacart, Peloton, OpenTable, Target, TheFork, Tripadvisor, Thumbtack, and Uber [1].

What was once a chatbot is now an interactive operating layer for the consumer internet, an interface where users can design, book, learn, buy, or stream without ever leaving the conversation.

ChatGPT’s App Ecosystem Turns Conversations into Commerce

This evolution transforms ChatGPT from a tool into an intent engine.

When a user says, “Plan a trip to Lisbon,” ChatGPT invokes Booking.com or Expedia [2]. “Design a poster” pulls up Figma or Canva [3]. “Find homes under $600,000 near Austin” calls Zillow [1]. “Learn data science” triggers Coursera [4]. “Create a chill playlist” activates Spotify [5].

Every prompt becomes an act of demand creation, and ChatGPT becomes the broker of that demand, deciding which partner fulfills it.

The result? A single interface that fuses ideation, discovery, and action.

The Strategic Shift: Chat Replaces Search as the Starting Point of Commerce

For the past two decades, Google and Amazon controlled the top of the funnel. Every digital transaction began with a search box. But now, the customer journey begins in a conversation, not a query.

This subtle shift has profound consequences:

• Search was intent capture. Chat is intent creation.

• Search showed options. Chat executes actions.

• Search required navigation. Chat handles orchestration.

The conversation has become the marketplace.

When ChatGPT routes intent directly to an app, the traditional marketing funnel collapses. The user’s need, the brand’s solution, and the transaction merge into a single interface.

The Hidden Economics: Why Collapsing the Funnel Changes Everything

The old digital economy relied on friction, each click, search, and visit generated data and revenue along the way. Every platform took a toll: Google on search, Meta on discovery, Amazon on purchase.

But ChatGPT’s zero-click ecosystem vaporizes those toll booths.

1. No search page. There’s no bidding for keywords or clicks.

2. No browsing layer. There’s no “compare” journey across sites.

3. No advertising loop. There’s only the AI deciding the best execution.

That means:

• Customer acquisition costs (CAC) for integrated brands plummet.

• Margins for intermediaries shrink, since they can’t intercept the user mid-journey.

• Data concentration increases, as ChatGPT sees every request, from travel to design to groceries.

We’re entering a phase where the interface, not the website, owns the user relationship.

Behavioral Shift: When Friction Disappears, Loyalty Changes

The behavioral implications are even bigger than the economic ones.

When you remove friction, you also remove deliberation. A user who once compared five travel sites now sees only one result, the one ChatGPT executes. That creates default-based loyalty, not brand loyalty.

Users begin to trust the AI’s judgment more than their own exploration. The brand they see most often in the chat becomes synonymous with the category itself.

This phenomenon mirrors what happened with voice assistants (e.g., “Alexa, order more detergent”), but now, it applies to the entire digital economy, across visual, creative, and service domains.

Behaviorally, this is the shift from search-and-select to ask-and-receive.

The psychological cost of switching drops to zero. But so does the user’s awareness of alternatives, a profound advantage for the integrated brands that get in early.

Platform Power: How AI Becomes the New Aggregator

This new model also reconfigures platform economics. OpenAI, by integrating leading apps, becomes a meta-platform that aggregates every other platform’s capabilities.

If Google indexed the web, ChatGPT is now indexing APIs, connecting structured brand actions to unstructured human intent.

That gives it immense leverage:

• Control over discovery: deciding which app is called for each intent.

• Control over economics: potentially charging partners for priority placement or transactions.

• Control over data: seeing cross-category patterns other companies can’t.

This is the aggregator model that defined past tech giants, only now, it’s powered by AI orchestration instead of search indexing.

And unlike app stores, which require active user downloads, ChatGPT’s integrations are passive defaults. You don’t install Expedia or Canva, they’re already “there.” That’s a massive retention advantage.

The Competitive Fallout: Who Loses in the Chat-First World

This shift introduces new existential risks for legacy platforms.

• Google loses top-of-funnel dominance as users stop searching and start chatting.

• Apple and Android lose app store distribution, as users access services through ChatGPT instead of opening apps.

• Meta loses advertising visibility, since conversations bypass the attention economy altogether.

• Amazon faces new retail competition, as AI-driven commerce becomes decentralized and brand-led.

Each of these incumbents thrived by owning a layer of the user journey, search, distribution, engagement, or fulfillment. But when ChatGPT owns all of them simultaneously, the power shifts upstream.

For example, if a user asks, “What’s a good running shoe under $150?” the AI might pull data from Shopify merchants, not Amazon listings. That cuts Amazon out of the flow before the user ever reaches its ecosystem.

We’re watching the unbundling of search and the rebundling of services, under AI control.

The New Moat: Owning the Default “Action”

In this new economy, being the default callable app for a task is the strongest competitive moat.

• Booking.com and Expedia own “book travel.”

• Figma and Canva own “create a design.”

• Zillow owns “find a home.”

• Coursera owns “learn a skill.”

• Spotify owns “customizing playlists.”

When the AI associates your brand with a verb, you’ve won the category.

Over time, these defaults will harden, not just through human preference, but through reinforcement learning. Every time ChatGPT calls Expedia, it learns to call Expedia more often. Every successful outcome strengthens the model’s bias toward that brand.

That’s not just a marketing moat. It’s an algorithmic moat.

Behavioral data more valuable than search data

The integration model creates an even deeper shift around data gravity.

Each chat query becomes a context-rich signal: intent, mood, timing, urgency, and cross-category context. When ChatGPT executes these actions through third-party apps, it sits at the nexus of all behavioral data, what people plan, buy, create, and consume.

That data is more valuable than search data, because it captures intent before the decision, not after.

Integrated partners may get anonymized insights, but OpenAI (and future AI ecosystems like Anthropic’s or Google’s Gemini) will own the high-level view, the macroeconomic map of human intent.

This could become the single richest dataset in commerce history, guiding how companies price, promote, and even design products.

Industry Reorganization: From Brands to APIs

Over the next few years, this shift will force organizations to evolve from brands that advertise into services that interoperate.

Every company will need an AI integration layer — clean APIs, transparent schemas, and contextual metadata — so AI platforms can invoke their capabilities instantly.

The marketing function will blur with the engineering function:

• Growth teams will compete to make their product the easiest for an AI to call.

• Product teams will optimize workflows for conversational execution.

• Partnerships teams will negotiate API access and category placement inside AI ecosystems.

The companies that adapt will gain compound visibility; those that don’t will find themselves excluded from the new interface economy.

Steps companies need to take to be part of next generation of digital infrastructure

1. Audit your “AI surface area.” Identify what parts of your business could be triggered by an AI prompt.

2. Expose your key actions. Convert your product’s core value into callable API endpoints.

3. Negotiate integration early. Being part of the first wave matters; defaults form quickly.

4. Measure new conversion paths. Track in-chat transactions and cross-AI attribution.

5. Train marketing teams on conversational optimization. Just as brands learned SEO, they’ll need to learn AIO, AI Interaction Optimization.

The companies that act first will become embedded in the next generation of digital infrastructure.

The Broader Stakes: AI Ecosystems as New Digital Trade Zones

Beyond business, this marks the beginning of AI ecosystems as economic zones. Each major AI model, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Meta’s Llama, will host its own app economy, data policies, and monetization structures.

Just as the web once splintered into the U.S., Chinese, and European internets, we may see fragmented AI economies emerge, each with distinct rules and partners.

For global brands, this means strategizing not just for one AI, but for an entire geopolitical stack of them, negotiating data-sharing, brand control, and category presence across different models and regions.

Why It All Matters: The Interface Has Become the Market

At a structural level, this moment echoes past technology inflection points:

• 1995: The browser unified access to the web.

• 2007: The smartphone unified the digital and physical world.

• 2025: Conversational AI unifies all intent and action into a single interface.

Each shift changed who owned the customer relationship. And each time, the winners were the companies that recognized that the interface is the market.

ChatGPT’s app ecosystem is not about novelty — it’s about control over discovery, action, and trust. The conversation is the new infrastructure layer of the internet.