OpenAI has announced app-like interfaces and automation inside ChatGPT, letting developers build something close to their own app within the chat window. The announcement came at the company's DevDay event in San Francisco on Tuesday.
What is new
ChatGPT already supported plug-ins, which is how services like Slack, SharePoint, Airtable and Google Drive connect to it. The new plug-in extensions give those services their own place in ChatGPT's sidebar, so a user can find and open the app they need from inside the conversation.
Extensions can also present interactive panels, and accept the file types the underlying app supports — so work that previously meant switching applications can happen in the conversation.
OpenAI also launched Plug-in Creator, a tool for building plug-ins more easily, and changed how the plug-in directory surfaces them: ChatGPT will now recommend relevant plug-ins during a conversation.
What it means in Bangladesh
Strip away the framing and this is a platform announcement of a very familiar kind. A company with enormous distribution is inviting developers to build inside its surface, and promising to recommend the good ones. Everyone who has watched an app store, a social platform's API or a payments SDK knows the shape of what follows.
The opportunity is real and it is not small. A Bangladeshi software firm can now put its product in front of ChatGPT's users without an app install, an app store review or a marketing budget. For the kind of work Bangladeshi firms already do well — back-office tools, logistics dashboards, invoicing, HR systems — a plug-in is a plausible distribution channel for the first time.
The cost is the one every platform imposes and it should be stated now rather than discovered later. A business built inside someone else's conversation does not own its customer relationship, its pricing or its discovery. The "recommend relevant plug-ins" sentence is the whole bargain in six words: the platform decides who gets seen, can change that ranking without notice, and can build the same feature itself.
There is also a quieter issue specific to this market. A plug-in that handles files is a plug-in through which customer data crosses into a US-hosted conversation. For a Bangladeshi firm serving a local bank, a hospital or a government department, that is a question for the contract, not an implementation detail — and the answer is not obviously permissible under existing data rules.
The sensible read is to build, but not to build the whole company there. A plug-in is a channel. The product should be able to survive the day the ranking changes.
The agent half of the same DevDay is in the Dots announcement, and one Bangladeshi team's version is in the OneBrain story.
