App makers featured at an OpenAI event on Monday mostly have failed to get a lift from exposure to the poster child of the artificial intelligence megatrend.
At its OpenAI DevDay 2025 conference in San Francisco, the company showed how software apps can be integrated with its ChatGPT AI engine. Pilot partners for apps in ChatGPT include Booking.com (BKNG), Canva, Coursera (COUR), Expedia (EXPE), Figma (FIG), Spotify (SPOT) and Zillow (Z). But shares of the publicly-traded pilot partners largely have retreated since the OpenAI event. The exception is Figma stock, which has climbed since the news.
OpenAI said those partners are offering “a new generation of apps you can chat with, right inside ChatGPT.”
The integration offers companies a new way to reach the more than 800 million weekly ChatGPT users, OpenAI said in a blog post. ChatGPT will suggest the apps when the subject is relevant or when users mention them by name.
More app makers will join the program later this year, OpenAI said. It named DoorDash (DASH), Maplebear‘s (CART) Instacart, Peloton (PTON), Target (TGT), Tripadvisor (TRIP) and Uber (UBER), among others.
OpenAI is offering companies a software developer kit called Apps SDK for building apps into ChatGPT.
In a research note, Macquarie analyst Steve Koenig said investors in software-as-a-service, or SaaS, companies have been worried about how AI services will hinder those stocks.
“We suspect investors may remain on edge about how OpenAI could disrupt broad swathes of the SaaS sector (e.g. by enabling the rapid creation of custom applications), but the DevDay provided some balance to the narrative on OpenAI as an existential threat,” Koenig said.
OpenAI wants to work with application developers rather than replace them, analysts said.
Changing The Narrative
OpenAI is seeking to become the user interface layer for third-party applications, TD Cowen analyst Derrick Wood said in a report.
“We think this could be the beginning of a narrative shift from ‘AI eating software’ to ‘AI enhancing software’ but AI disruption fears will likely persist,” Wood said.
The OpenAI event should have been a relief for beleaguered software investors, UBS analyst Karl Keirstead said. OpenAI does not appear to be a threat to incumbent software firms, he said.
Mizuho Securities analyst Siti Panigrahi said, “ChatGPT is emerging as the gateway to the AI world, akin to how Netscape once positioned for the Internet world.”
“Its conversational interface seamlessly integrates with diverse apps and underlying data, enabling a hyper-personalized front-end for both consumer and business users,” Panigrahi said. “This should ease investors’ concerns that AI would displace SaaS, as instead, we see OpenAI extending SaaS applications by providing a new, intelligent interaction layer, while existing SaaS applications remain the underlying execution engines of enterprise workflows in the near term.”
ChatGPT Is A Threat To Search, App Stores
Mizuho analyst Lloyd Walmsley said ChatGPT is looking more like an operating system as it disrupts the open web.
“Apps in ChatGPT … aspire to remake the entire interaction layer of the internet, with OpenAI controlling more and deeper levels of the web that ever before, operating akin to an OS platform,” Walmsley said in a report.
“To the extent everything starts on ChatGPT, it’s clearly a threat to search and app stores broadly,” Walmsley said. “This seems like a risk to anything ad-supported … If more and more user activity sits inside ChatGPT making calls to apps inside of it, it risks relegating many existing apps more to commodities.”
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