OpenAI plans biggest ChatGPT overhaul into an AI ‘superapp’

TL;DR:

  • OpenAI plans its biggest ChatGPT redesign since launch, turning it into a “superapp” built around coding tools and AI agents.
  • The shift targets business customers and higher-margin products ahead of a planned IPO; one senior employee said simply, “Chat is dead”.
  • Business users already supply about 40% of revenue, which OpenAI expects to reach 50% by year-end.

OpenAI is preparing the largest overhaul of ChatGPT since the product launched the generative-AI boom, as the company hunts for new sources of growth before a planned listing. The plan recasts the chatbot as a “superapp” combining coding tools, image generation and AI agents that perform tasks rather than simply answer questions.

Chasing margins ahead of a listing

The redesign, reported by the Financial Times and corroborated by Reuters, reflects a conviction that the future lies in agents, not chat. It will give greater prominence to OpenAI’s coding product Codex — whose weekly users have grown sixfold to more than five million since February — and steer users toward partner services such as Canva and Booking.com. “Chat is dead,” one senior employee told the FT. Product chief Thibault Sottiaux described building toward “your own personal agent that is capable of helping you across everything in your life”.

The move pulls OpenAI’s strategy closer to rival Anthropic, whose business-first focus has driven rapid growth. As one former OpenAI researcher put it, both firms are converging because “investors care more about money than dreams”. Some consumer bets are being sidelined: the in-chat checkout feature has been shelved and the Sora video product shut down less than a year after launch.

Looking forward

For UK businesses, the signal is that the consumer chatbot era is giving way to agentic, enterprise-grade tooling — the same shift visible in Microsoft’s agentic Scout assistant and the broader pivot to AI that acts. With nearly a billion users as a funnel, OpenAI is betting it can convert reach into recurring revenue. The risk is execution: agents that book travel or write production code raise the stakes on reliability, and a botched “superapp” could erode the trust that made ChatGPT ubiquitous.

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