OpenAI's ChatGPT App Store: What It Means for Industrial Software (Probably Not Much, Yet)

The reality is we're nowhere close to that for anything safety-critical, and I'm not sure OpenAI understands the certification requirements for industrial environments. But for non-critical stuff (inventory queries, documentation lookup, basic scheduling), there's something here.

Key things I noticed in the announcement:

• Apps go through a review process before publication, which suggests some quality control but remains unclear how rigorous
• The SDK is in "preview," meaning this is early days and the API will probably change
• There's a directory for discovery, so users can actually find these apps without knowing they exist
• The focus is on "chat-native" experiences, not just bolting a chatbot onto existing software

That last point matters more than it sounds. I've seen too many industrial software vendors slap a chatbot on their existing product and call it AI-enabled. This seems to be pushing developers toward actually rethinking how interactions work when everything is conversational.

The Parts I'm Skeptical About

Frank thinks the big automation vendors will jump on this within a year. I think he's dreaming. When I left Kuka in 2019, we were still arguing about whether to support a particular fieldbus protocol that had been around for fifteen years. The idea that Siemens or Rockwell is going to build ChatGPT apps for their PLCs anytime soon seems, well, optimistic.

The more likely path is smaller integrators and software houses building bridges. Someone will connect ChatGPT to Ignition. Someone will build a maintenance management app that talks to your CMMS. It'll be piecemeal and probably a bit janky at first, like everything in industrial software always is.

I also don't know what the security model looks like. The announcement doesn't go into detail about how these apps authenticate with external systems, how data is handled, any of that. For consumer apps, maybe that's fine. For anything touching production systems, that's a problem. We don't know yet how OpenAI plans to address this, or if they're even thinking about industrial use cases at all.

The other thing that nags at me: this is OpenAI's walled garden. You build for ChatGPT, you're locked into ChatGPT. When I was working with robot programming environments in the early 2000s, we made that mistake with proprietary platforms more than once. Some of those vendors don't exist anymore, and neither does the code we wrote for them.

What I'm Actually Going to Do About This

Probably nothing immediate. I'm semi-retired and not building production systems anymore. But if I were still in the game, I'd be keeping an eye on what apps show up in that directory over the next six months. The early adopters will show us what's actually possible versus what's just marketing.

I'd also be talking to my IT and OT security people about what it would mean to let ChatGPT interact with internal systems. Not to do it yet, just to understand the implications. Because if this takes off in consumer and enterprise software (which it might), the pressure to adopt it in industrial settings will follow. It always does.

For now, this is interesting but not urgent. Check back in a year and we'll see if I was wrong.

Sarah Williams · 48 mins ago · 7 min