Chat Plugins: This Seemingly Simple Tech Is Going To Spawn A Whole New Vintage Of Successful Businesses

When I worked at Microsoft, I pitched multiple conversational UI products.

The tech wasn’t ready. The business model was weak. My pitch didn’t get funded. Boo.

But success in tech is largely a timing game. Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude (Anthropic) and ChatGPT (OpenAI) are allowing me to dust off those old ideas.

My macro take on the future of software applications is that, given a choice, 80% of customers will choose the experience that is most personalized. The other 20% will reject hyper-personalization due to change resistance, privacy concerns, or an aversion to subscription pricing. The most personalized experience for this next wave of tech will be text UIs (followed by integrating audio, images, and video). For the 80% of customers who opt-in to these hyper-personalized experiences, this is going to have a material impact on how we use the Internet.

While Microsoft and OpenAI are the first to launch their plugin programs, we will see similar capabilities from Alphabet, Apple, and Meta. Each player may take a different approach, but chat-first hyper-personalized experiences are going to be the preferred UI modality for many customers. Tech companies are going to accommodate. Mobile apps and websites aren’t going anywhere in the short term. This shift will be expansionary.

So far, I’ve written two ChatGPT plugins, and it’s very obvious that chat plugins that connect a company’s data with conversational UIs will be part of the next wave. New waves are where the small players can make the most money.

Give me a shout if you want to talk conversational AI.