Unlocking the Future: ChatGPT’s Transformation at OpenAI DevDay 2025

Every year, OpenAI’s DevDay offers a glimpse into the future of AI—its tools, ecosystem, and ambitions. The 2025 edition was no exception. In this event, OpenAI revealed a host of new products, APIs, and strategies that together signal a transition: from a singular conversational AI to a full-fledged interactive platform, or even an “operating system” for AI-powered applications.

Apps In ChatGPT & Apps SDK

Perhaps the boldest move at DevDay was enabling apps to run inside ChatGPT itself. Rather than invoking external services via API calls, users will soon be able to interact with third-party tools directly within their chat sessions. To support this, OpenAI introduced the Apps SDK (in preview). Developers can build apps that are adaptive, interactive, and personalized—all wrapped inside the chat interface. Early partners like Booking.com, Spotify, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Zillow, and Figma showcased demos of what this integration looks like.

The upshot: ChatGPT is morphing from a conversational bot into a distributed app platform, where tools and services live natively inside the conversation.

AgentKit: Building Smarter Agents

To complement apps, OpenAI introduced AgentKit — a toolkit for crafting autonomous, task-driven agents. These agents can reason, act, and orchestrate workflows that extend beyond a single user request. AgentKit is part of OpenAI’s vision for agents as first-class citizens: entities that combine planning, tools, memory, and user interaction to achieve complex goals.

Behind the scenes, the Agents paradigm builds on OpenAI’s earlier “Responses API” and upgrades it with richer infrastructure (monitoring, environment controls, analytics) to make these agents production-ready.

AI agent - digital text on digital display. Machine Learning Concepts. AI - Artificial Intelligence digital concept. LLM large language model. chat bot. Agentic AI

Upgrades to the API: GPT-5 Pro, RealTime Mini & Sora 2

GPT-5 Pro was announced as a powerful new model for domain-intensive tasks things like legal, financial, or scientific reasoning where deeper “thinking” and accuracy are essential. RealTime Mini is a lighter, voice-first model said to cost ~70% less than full voice models yet maintaining expressiveness and quality. OpenAI sees voice as a critical modality going forward.

Sora 2 (video generation) was pushed into the API for the first time. This brings video capabilities into developers’ hands—allowing control over length, aspect ratio, effects, and remixing. These updates significantly expand the multimodal and agentic capacities of the OpenAI platform.

Enterprise & Governance Upgrades

Admin tools, dashboards, monitoring, environment controls were emphasized to give enterprises confidence in deploying AI at scale.There were hints about data control, pricing, and governance guardrails, recognizing that for many institutions, how AI is managed is as important as what it can do.

Conclusion

OpenAI DevDay 2025 wasn’t just a product showcase; it was a statement of intent. ChatGPT is being reborn not just as a tool you talk to, but as a canvas on which entire apps and agents can be built, deployed, discovered, and monetized.

If OpenAI delivers on the performance, safety, and governance fronts, this could mark the shift from AI as a backend service to AI as a unified user-facing ecosystem. We may one day look back at DevDay 2025 as the moment when the AI assistant became its own app platform—and the future of software, agents, and human-AI collaboration began to reshape itself.