OpenAI's ChatGPT App Store: What It Means for Industrial Automation

The documentation talks about "bringing real-world actions into ChatGPT." That's vague enough to mean almost anything. Could a Fanuc or ABB build an app that lets maintenance techs ask questions about error codes in plain English? Probably. Could you eventually have a chat interface that actually programs robot paths? Maybe, though I'd want to see the safety validation on that one.

I called a former colleague who's now at a systems integrator in Michigan. He hadn't heard about the SDK yet. That tells you something about how disconnected our industry still is from the consumer AI hype cycle.

The gap between possible and practical

I'll be honest, I'm skeptical about how quickly this matters for industrial automation. The consumer apps will come first: shopping assistants, travel booking, that sort of thing. The industrial applications require something the SDK can't provide, which is trust.

When I worked on automotive lines, every software change went through validation processes that took weeks. Sometimes months. The idea that a maintenance tech could chat with an AI and have it modify robot parameters... that's not a technical problem. It's a cultural and regulatory one. Plant managers don't want surprises. They want predictability.

That said, there's a middle ground. Read-only applications, things that let you query robot status, pull historical data, ask about maintenance schedules, those could work. You're not changing anything, just making information more accessible. I could see Siemens or Rockwell building something like that.

What happens next

OpenAI says approved apps will appear in a directory inside ChatGPT for "easy discovery." That's interesting phrasing. They're basically building an app store, and app stores create ecosystems. If enough industrial vendors build apps (and that's a big if), you could end up with ChatGPT becoming a unified interface for querying multiple automation platforms.

Or it could go nowhere. I've seen enough industry initiatives fizzle to know that "could" and "will" are different words.

The companies I'm watching are the ones already investing in natural language interfaces: Universal Robots with their programming tools, Veo Robotics before they shut down, some of the newer cobot startups. They've already done the hard work of making robot interaction more conversational. Plugging into ChatGPT's platform might actually make sense for them.

For the big players, Fanuc, ABB, Kuka, I'm less sure. They move slowly, and they've got their own proprietary ecosystems to protect. Why would they give OpenAI a piece of their customer relationship?

I don't have answers yet. Nobody does. But I'll be keeping an eye on that app directory over the next few months. The first industrial automation company to show up there will tell us something about where this is heading.

Mark Kowalski · 2 days ago · 7 min