The Conversational Platform: The new human-computing platform
AI turns conversation into the new interface and agents into the new apps
Last week, I wrote that as AI makes it trivial to create apps it will unleash a Cambrian explosion of software, and consequently new aggregation platforms to curate these new apps.
AI will allow anyone with an idea and curiosity to build something that works. But that flood has consequences. Hundreds of near-identical AI-generated tools will appear overnight, many indistinguishable in function or quality. Just as streaming turned the music economy into a power law—where a tiny fraction of artists capture the majority of plays—the software market could polarize between a few aggregators and millions of niche creators barely scraping visibility. The next Spotify or YouTube for software won’t be a tool that helps people make apps—it’ll be the system that helps people find them.
It didn’t take long for the idea to materialize. With OpenAI unveiling apps inside ChatGPT, the Cambrian explosion—and the aggregation platform I’d been thinking about—has begun to take shape.
The announcement transforms ChatGPT from a product into a platform: an intelligent substrate where anyone can build and distribute software through conversation. It unifies the flood—one interface, one ecosystem, one operating system for AI-native software.
The parallels to Apple’s App Store moment are hard to miss. In 2008, the iPhone was a sleek gadget until Apple opened it to developers and gave them a distribution channel. Suddenly, a device became a platform, and a whole generation of new businesses—Uber, Instagram, WhatsApp—emerged from that ecosystem. ChatGPT is stepping into the same role, but at a higher layer of abstraction. Developers can now build apps that live inside the assistant, not on your home screen. You don’t download them; you summon them by name or by intent. “Spotify, make me a playlist.” “Booking.com, find me a hotel in Lisbon.” The app materializes in the chat—interactive, visual, contextual. There’s no install, no tab switching. The interface is the conversation itself.
For developers, the opportunity is enormous. ChatGPT already reaches more people each week than most platforms ever do—hundreds of millions of users—and the new Apps SDK gives them a direct, built-in audience. Apps can even be surfaced contextually as ChatGPT interprets a user’s goal: mention moving cities and it might suggest Zillow; plan a trip and it might bring up Expedia or Booking.com. Distribution becomes AI-driven discovery. OpenAI is introducing a directory, a review process, and a commerce protocol for in-chat payments. It looks and feels like an app store reborn for a world where code is abundant and attention is scarce.
This fits a deeper pattern. Computing platforms tend to evolve in roughly ten-year cycles, each one moving closer to human intent. The PC era revolved around desktop operating systems like Windows. The 2000s shifted power to browsers and search. The 2010s crowned the mobile OS and its app stores as the dominant distribution layer. Now, the AI assistant is emerging as the next platform—the place where computing begins and ends. ChatGPT’s leadership calls it a “chat-driven OS.” That description feels right: a new layer where software runs through dialogue instead of clicks, and where the AI, not the user, handles the orchestration of tools.
The difference this time lies in how we interact and how work gets done. The first shift is in interface. For half a century, we’ve interacted with software through visual metaphors: windows, buttons, icons, menus. ChatGPT replaces that with language. You describe what you want, and it decides which apps or APIs to call. The boundary between your intention and execution dissolves. Software becomes conversational—adaptive, continuous, and human-shaped. It’s as if the command line, the GUI, and the touchscreen all evolved into a single interface: dialogue: written or conversational.
The second shift is orchestration. Until now, users have been the glue between apps. You open Expedia for flights, Booking.com for hotels, OpenTable for restaurants. You copy, paste, compare, confirm. The AI platform reverses that dynamic. It becomes the orchestrator. Tell ChatGPT, “Plan me a weeklong trip to Lisbon and Valencia in June, budget three hundred a night, walkable neighborhoods, one Michelin lunch and a few cozy bistros,” and it will coordinate the entire workflow. Expedia finds flights, Booking.com filters hotels, OpenTable reserves dinners, a rail app handles the train. Each app contributes a piece, and the assistant threads them together into a single itinerary—complete with confirmations, payments, and live updates—all inside the same conversation. The operating system isn’t managing windows anymore; it’s managing your intent.
What’s emerging isn’t just a new way to use software—it’s a new way for software to exist. Each platform shift in computing has compressed the distance between human intention and machine execution. The desktop gave us personal control, the web gave us reach, the smartphone gave us immediacy. The AI platform is giving us agency. We no longer tell machines how to do something—we tell them what we want, and they decide the how. That’s the deeper revolution hiding inside OpenAI’s announcement. It’s not about a new feature or SDK; it’s about a redefinition of computing itself. The interface becomes language, the operating system becomes intelligence, and the app store becomes a living conversation—an infinite canvas where creation and coordination happen in the same breath.