The OpenAI App Store Is Coming For Small Business Software
- Christy Mackenzie
- 23 hours ago
- 10 min read
How a marketplace for AI-native apps could become the next Shopify or Apple App Store moment, and why the stakes are even higher for small firms.
The fluorescent light over the counter is buzzing, the espresso machine is hissing, and Maya, who runs a three-person coffee shop in a New York neighborhood, is squinting at her laptop.
On one tab: her point-of-sale system.
On another: a spreadsheet of regulars and their usual orders.
On a third: ChatGPT, where she is testing a new app that promises to turn customer chat logs into marketing campaigns in seconds.
She did not hire a data scientist. She did not sign a big SaaS contract. She just opened the OpenAI app store and clicked “Install.”
If OpenAI gets its way, this scene will not be a fringe experiment. It will be the new small-business operating system.
What Exactly Is The OpenAI App Store?
OpenAI’s first shot at a marketplace arrived as the GPT Store in early 2024, a place where creators could publish specialized GPTs (customized versions of ChatGPT) for discovery by paying users and businesses.
In 2025, that concept is evolving into a broader OpenAI app layer: developers can ship full apps that run inside the ChatGPT interface, use OpenAI’s models, and plug into external tools via the OpenAI Apps SDK and the Model Context Protocol.
If the original GPT Store was a shelf of clever chatbots, the emerging OpenAI app store is more like an AI-native operating system:
Distribution: hundreds or thousands of apps, surfaced through search, rankings, and editorial picks.
Runtime: apps live directly inside ChatGPT, where hundreds of millions of users already are.
Payments and identity: OpenAI handles accounts, billing, and access control.
It looks a lot like what Apple did with the App Store and what Shopify did with its app ecosystem for merchants, only this time, the core interaction is not tapping icons. It is speaking and typing in natural language.
Why This Matters Right Now
The timing is not an accident. Across the economy, AI has moved from curiosity to infrastructure. Recent global surveys suggest that more than 90 percent of companies are either using or exploring AI in their operations.
In Canada, one study found that about 12 percent of businesses already use AI in producing goods or delivering services, with adoption highest in information, professional services, and finance.
For small and medium sized businesses, the shift is even more striking. A Canadian survey sponsored by Microsoft reported that 71 percent of SMBs using AI saw improved efficiency and productivity, and 86 percent said their overall experience with AI was positive.
Another study on entrepreneurs found that 97 percent of SMEs using AI reported tangible benefits such as higher sales, better customer service, and reduced costs.
The desire is there. The bottleneck is how to access AI in a way that feels safe, simple, and affordable.
That is the opening the OpenAI app store is trying to exploit. Instead of asking a bakery, a dentist, or a small marketing agency to purchase and integrate yet another niche SaaS product, OpenAI is inviting them to browse an app store that lives inside a tool they already use.
Lessons From Previous App Store Revolutions
To understand what this could mean for small businesses, it helps to look at earlier app ecosystems.
The Apple App Store turned independent developers into global businesses. Apple has highlighted research showing that small developers on the App Store grew revenue by 71 percent over a two-year period and that small developer earnings increased 118 percent in the United States over another two-year span, outpacing larger peers.
Shopify did something similar for merchants. By 2020, Shopify’s app store had exploded from 3,700 apps to over 6,000, giving small online retailers access to everything from email automation to inventory forecasting with a few clicks.
Later analysis shows thousands more apps and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue flowing to third party developers building on top of Shopify’s core platform.
These ecosystems share a pattern:
The platform controls distribution, payments, and rules.
Developers build specialized tools that the platform does not have the time or niche knowledge to build itself.
Small businesses pick from a menu of add ons and stitch together their own tech stack.
The OpenAI app store follows the same playbook, but with one crucial twist: instead of plugging into websites or phones, these apps plug into conversations.
That difference matters because much of small business work is conversational: answering customer questions, negotiating with suppliers, coaching staff, and triaging the daily swarm of emails, DMs, and tickets. An app layer embedded directly in a chat interface is a direct line into that work.
The Upside: A New Toolkit For The Underserved Majority
For small businesses, the potential upside is real and specific.
4.1 Off the shelf intelligence
Instead of having to license a dozen SaaS products, each with its own login and narrow use case, a small business owner could assemble a stack of OpenAI apps:
A bookkeeping assistant that reconciles receipts and flags anomalies.
A marketing planner that turns chat transcripts and reviews into campaign ideas.
A hiring copilot that screens resumes, drafts interview questions, and summarizes candidate calls.
A sector-specific expert, tuned for barbershops, physiotherapy clinics, independent bookstores, or dental practices.
As one composite small business owner told us during interviews for this piece:
"If this actually works, I can finally stop juggling ten different dashboards and just ask one place what is going on."
In a world where nearly three out of four businesses already use AI in at least one function but many struggle to scale the value, an app store that packages AI capabilities into ready made tools could be a powerful equalizer.
4.2 Micro SaaS on hard mode, made easier
The app store is not just a catalog for buyers. It is also a new path for builders.
A solo consultant who has spent a decade in logistics can turn their knowledge into a workflow app that lives inside ChatGPT. A niche agency can productize its best repeated processes as apps instead of only selling hourly services.
OpenAI’s GPT Store is potentially "bigger for entrepreneurs than Apple’s App Store," arguing that the combination of low friction creation and massive built in distribution could unlock a wave of AI micro businesses.
That claim is ambitious, but the logic is straightforward:
The barrier to building is lower: you do not need to design a full mobile interface, manage databases, or set up complex hosting.
The user acquisition path is built in: your app can be discovered via search and categories in the store, and it runs where users already spend time.
The business model is flexible: subscriptions, pay per use, or value added services layered on top. For small businesses that are already experts in their niche but not in software, this could be the first realistic way to become software sellers, not just software buyers.
The Downside: Platform Risk, Discoverability, And The Long Tail Trap
The bright story has a shadow.
5.1 A lottery with platform odds
Most app stores follow a power law: a few apps capture most of the attention and revenue, while a long tail of niche tools barely gets noticed.
Research on mobile app stores has shown that as much as 70 percent of apps in major stores receive fewer than 1,000 downloads, leading to a bifurcated ecosystem where a small minority of popular apps dominate while the rest struggle to break out.
There is no reason to believe the OpenAI app store will behave differently. Small businesses that invest time and money into building an app could find themselves in a familiar trap: dependent on a single platform’s algorithms, search ranking, and opaque editorial choices.
App store optimization is the art of crafting names, descriptions, and update cadences to win visibility and is already a cottage industry in the mobile world. The same dynamics will likely emerge around AI app stores. That favors developers with marketing budgets and growth teams, not a solo florist building a clever scheduling app.
5.2 Uneven revenue sharing and data opacity
The economics are also uncertain.
Reporting in 2024 highlighted that many GPT Store developers were struggling with limited analytics and unclear payouts. One investigation found that some creators, especially those outside the United States, were excluded from revenue sharing entirely, leaving them without a clear path to sustainable income.
Community speculation has tried to reverse engineer possible revenue share formulas and upper bounds, but even optimistic models suggest that top creators will capture the lion’s share, with many small developers earning negligible amounts.
For a small business trying to decide whether to invest in building an app or simply using others, the lack of clear, stable economics is a genuine risk.
5.3 Lock in, but deeper
When a small business commits to an app store ecosystem, it is not just adopting a tool. It is adopting a source of truth.
In mobile or e commerce app stores, lock in usually means you are tied to a payment provider or an app that handles some operational function. In the OpenAI app store, you are binding your workflows, your customer data, and your staff’s day to day decision making into a single AI platform that intermediates every interaction.
Switching later is not just a matter of exporting a CSV. It may mean retraining staff, rebuilding prompts, and migrating sensitive conversational data to another environment.
The Quiet Disruption Of Existing Small Business Software
If the OpenAI app store succeeds, it will not exist in a vacuum. It will sit directly in the path of thousands of small SaaS vendors that already sell to small businesses.
Today, a typical small business might pay separately for:
Email marketing and automation
Chatbots and helpdesk software
CRM and lightweight ERPs
Booking and scheduling tools
HR and recruitment software
Many of these functions are essentially patterns of information retrieval and structured communication, exactly the sort of tasks large language models excel at.
An AI app that lives inside ChatGPT can:
Read and write email on your behalf
Connect to your calendar and bookings
Summarize customer conversations
Draft and update CRM notes
Generate marketing copy that plugs into existing platforms
Once enough of that is happening in one place, the OpenAI interface, the incentive to log in to separate SaaS dashboards shrinks.
For small SaaS vendors, this is an existential problem. For small businesses, it is short term convenience with long term questions: who ultimately owns the relationship and the data?
Responsible AI, Small Teams, And Compliance Headaches
Another tension sits under the surface: responsible AI.
Studies of businesses trying to adopt AI at scale show that most organizations struggle with responsible AI reliability, privacy protection, bias, and risk management, even as they acknowledge it will be a major competitive advantage.
Large companies can at least throw teams and lawyers at the problem. Small businesses cannot. They are often relying on vendor assurances and default settings.
The OpenAI app store centralizes some of this complexity, apps must follow OpenAI’s policies and leverage its security infrastructure, but it does not eliminate the core issues:
Data flows: what happens to uploaded documents, call transcripts, or financial data once it flows through an app?
Bias and discrimination: could an AI powered hiring app or lending assistant encode discriminatory patterns, even inadvertently?
Explainability: if an app makes a recommendation that turns out badly, how does a small business audit the reasoning?
Small businesses are unlikely to be reading model cards or differential privacy documentation. They will rely on app store signals: badges, ratings, editorial highlights.
If those signals are weak or misleading, the risk is that the most polished app wins, not the most responsible one.
A Realistic Playbook For Small Businesses
Against this backdrop, what should small businesses actually do as the OpenAI app store matures?
8.1 Use it as a lab, not a religion
Treat the store as an experimentation space, not a full migration path.
Start with low stakes use cases: drafting emails, summarizing notes, generating marketing ideas.
Pilot apps that do not touch sensitive personal or financial data at first.
Compare outputs from multiple apps for the same task to build intuition on quality.
8.2 Keep your core data portable
No matter how appealing the apps, keep copies of:
Customer lists and CRM data
Sales and revenue records
HR and hiring data
Key operational documents
If an app disappears, changes its pricing, or the platform shifts policies, you want the ability to move on.
8.3 Demand clarity from app builders
Before relying on a specific app, ask basic but powerful questions:
What data does this app store, and where?
How long is data retained, and can it be deleted on request?
Is the app developer a registered business with clear contact information?
Is there a public privacy policy and terms of use?
These are minimal standards, but they create a barrier against throwaway experiments masquerading as business critical tools.
8.4 Consider building, but only for real leverage
For small businesses tempted to build their own apps, the calculus should be strict:
Does this encode a genuine proprietary process or niche expertise?
Would this app save your own team significant time, even if no one else used it?
Is there a realistic audience beyond your own organization?
If the answer to all three is yes, building could make sense even if the external revenue is modest. If not, it is probably better to stand on the shoulders of existing apps and focus on what you uniquely do.
The Next 3 Years: What To Watch
Over the next three years, the impact of the OpenAI app store on small businesses will depend on several moving parts.
9.1 Pricing and revenue models
If OpenAI’s pricing and revenue sharing end up favoring a handful of big partners, small developers and the small businesses they serve may find themselves squeezed, repeating the criticisms we already see in mobile app stores.
If, on the other hand, the platform experiments with more generous splits, grants, or promotional support for smaller builders (as Shopify has done with some developers), the store could become a genuine engine of micro entrepreneurship.
9.2 Regulation and interoperability
Regulators are increasingly interested in AI platforms that intermediate markets. How governments classify and oversee AI app stores – as app stores, as AI systems, or as something new entirely will influence what kinds of obligations they face around transparency, safety, and competition.
Interoperability efforts, such as open standards for prompts, agent workflows, or context formats, could also blunt lock in. If small business workflows can move between OpenAI and competing platforms without being fully rewritten, the power balance shifts.
9.3 The user interface battle
Finally, there is a quiet battle for the main user interface for small business AI.
Will it be:
General purpose chat interfaces like ChatGPT, with app stores on top?
Vertical platforms (accounting, HR, CRM) that embed AI deeply but keep the old dashboards?
New AI native workspaces built around agents and timelines rather than apps?
If OpenAI wins that battle, its app store becomes the primary gateway small businesses use to access AI. If it does not, the app store may still matter, but more as plumbing behind other brands.
A New Gatekeeper For The Small Business Mind
When Apple launched the App Store, few independent coffee shops or local repair businesses could imagine they would one day rely on mobile apps for scheduling, payments, and marketing.
The OpenAI app store is a similar inflection point, but for thinking work.
For small businesses, the stakes are twofold:
Access: cheaper, more flexible, and more powerful tools than have ever been available, without needing an IT department.
Dependency: deeper reliance on a single platform to mediate customer relationships, internal workflows, and even strategic decisions.
The small business story will not just be about who builds the cleverest AI app. It will be about who controls the shelves, the search box, and the recommendation engine that decides which tools owners like Maya even see.
That is where the real power sits. And it is where small businesses, regulators, and the broader public will need to pay close attention.
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