OpenAI ChatGPT Redesign Into Super App Signals Death Of Chat Interface As Company Shifts Focus To AI Agents And Enterprise Revenue Growth
According to a Financial Times report, which spoke with 10 current and former OpenAI employees, the company is embarking on the biggest ever redesign for its conversational chatbot, transforming ChatGPT into a "super app". The overhaul will allow users to take advantage of software development tools and proactive AI Agent functionality, and is seen as a move to rapidly expand revenue and refine the company structure ahead of a likely US IPO.
An internal senior employee told the Financial Times the "chat interface is dead," signaling a change from the model of users asking questions, to the company executing tasks for them. Thibault Sottiaux, who leads the core product and platform team, confirmed to the newspaper that the development team is "working towards building a personal AI Agent that helps a user with tasks at work and in his/her life on multiple devices."
To achieve this, the company has combined its main product teams including the ChatGPT and Codex teams into a single unit. The company has subsequently frozen development of several consumer oriented projects in order to focus on its high margin enterprise clients. This marks a more serious embrace of enterprise clients than previously, where the focus was largely on consumers and in alignment with competitors such as Anthropic. Currently 2,000,000 enterprise clients make up 40% of revenue, which is expected to reach 50% by the end of the year.
The overhaul will also put a huge emphasis on Codex, OpenAI's own programming platform. The new user interfaces of the ChatGPT website and mobile applications will contain prompts to encourage the use of coding, image generation and other third party services and corporate partner tools like Canva and Booking.com will appear within the interface.
Despite the growing corporate focus, the company still maintains its substantial consumer following, with more than 900,000,000 weekly active users and 50,000,000 paid consumers. In April Reuters reported that OpenAI was drawing up confidential filings for a public share listing, though its chief executive Sam Altman insisted there will be "no deadline for an IPO and the timing will depend on the operational timing". The agency could not immediately confirm the reports of reorganization and OpenAI would not comment on the matter.
