Consumers skip ads but not rewards. Fetch drives performance with 12.5M+ monthly users and 11.5M+ receipts scanned daily, capturing 88% of household spend. Your brand becomes the reward earning real engagement, verified purchases, and lasting loyalty. Fetch: America’s Rewards App. Where brands are the center of joy. Learn more at business.fetch.com.

Marcus Johnson (00:00):

Consumers have been known to skip ads. What they won't skip is a cheeky little reward. And Fetch drives performance. With over 12.5 million monthly active users and over 11.5 million receipts scanned daily, that's going to capture 88% of household spend. Your brands becomes the reward, earning real engagement, verified purchases, and loyalty. Fetch, it's America's rewards app and it's also where brands are the center of joy.

(00:36):

Hey, gang, it's Friday, October 24th. Yory, Grace and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, new market video podcast made possible by Fetch.

(00:44):

I'm Marcus and joining me for today's conversation we have two people. Let me introduce them. We start with our principal analyst who heads up our advertising media and tech teams, all of them based in New Jersey. It's Yory Wurmser.

Yory Wurmser (00:54):

Hey Marcus, how are you?

Marcus Johnson (00:56):

Hey fella, Very good. Happy to have you on the show. And also happy to have our AI and tech analyst living on the West Coast. It's Grace Harmon.

Grace Harmon (01:04):

Hi guys, nice to be with you.

Marcus Johnson (01:05):

Hello, happy you could join as well.

(01:08):

Today's fact. The tallest mountain on earth above sea level is? I always think this is a trick question.

Yory Wurmser (01:23):

Mount Everest, no?

Marcus Johnson (01:25):

It is indeed. Everest, 29,000 feet tall, which is 9,000 meters for people outside of America. That would be, if you can't visualize, it's not a great factor by itself, but 'cause everyone knows Everest is the tallest, but that would be like stacking One World Trade building on top of itself 29 times. So that's how tall Everest is and people climb this voluntarily. The fastest person to ever climb Everest was Lakpa Gelu Sherpa from Nepal, scaling it in just under 11 hours in 2003. Surprising no one's done it faster with more modern equipment and whatever. It was two decades ago, but it's just remarkable. So yeah, Yory next time 'cause I know you head into our New York office a couple of times a week and each time you look up at the One World Trade building, which is across the street from our office, just stack 28 more on top of it and that's Everest for you.

Yory Wurmser (02:37):

That's a hell for you.

Marcus Johnson (02:41):

If that's not big enough, Olympus Mons on Mars is the tallest volcano in the solar system and that is three times higher than Mount Everest. So that'd be nearly 190 basically One World Trades all on top of each other. No, thank you. Anyway, today's real topic is OpenAI maybe becoming the next operating system.

(03:08):

Ina Fried of Axios writes that OpenAI isn't just opening up ChatGPT for app developers, it's looking to turn today's leading chatbot into tomorrow's operating system or OS, as we call it. OpenAI boss, Sam Altman said the move would enable a new generation of apps that are adaptive, interactive and personalized, that you can chat with. As Maxwell Zeff of TechCrunch explains, it puts apps directly in ChatGPT's responses and lets users call up third-party tools in their everyday conversations. So for example, from ChatGPT, you could prompt Canva, an integrated app, to draw up posters for a dog-walking business, is one of the examples, ask for a pitch deck to raise capital, ask ChatGPT to then suggest city to expand in, then ask Zillow, another integrated app, to show three-bedroom homes with a yard for sale in said city or within ChatGPT.

(04:00):

Grace, what does OpenAI as an operating system look like in practice to you?

Grace Harmon (04:06):

Sure. I think that was a pretty good description. So it's, you know imagine-

Marcus Johnson (04:10):

Unbelievable.

Grace Harmon (04:11):

Unbelievable.

Marcus Johnson (04:12):

I nailed that.

Grace Harmon (04:13):

Imagine like your phone, your laptop, but instead of everything being built around apps or icons, it's around just a really capable AI that's running the show. So you'd interact with it conversationally, ask to do things for you, or connect tools for you like you were saying. And those smaller tools would still exist on their own, but the apps would plug directly into the AI. So it'd be like, "Hey, I need to plan a trip" and the system can just pull up a calendar, pull up a flight map automatically, and the device itself would work more like a living assistant than a piece of hardware, with apps just slapped on top of it.

Marcus Johnson (04:44):

So WeChat, the Chinese super app, has many programs and that's kind of been the gold standard for a lot of folks in the West trying to create a super app. Lauren Goode and Will Knight of Wired say if the web and mobile areas of the past 30 years were defined by users browsing the web or being locked into a mobile app experience, OpenAI is now combining the two into its own kind of chat-driven OS. Grace, you wrote OpenAI introduced this wide swath of app integrations for ChatGPT, pushing gen AI chatbot towards super app status. Do you think this is a super app that the West has been waiting for?

Grace Harmon (05:25):

I think that it's on its way there. I don't know that you could at all compare it to WeChat at this point, but I think that OpenAI is definitely pushing in that direction.

Marcus Johnson (05:33):

Okay.

Yory Wurmser (05:34):

And I think, it's a great analogy with WeChat, but I think that the big difference is that WeChat was established during an era where there wasn't really vibrant internet in China. People mostly were connecting through phones. This was this really almost the fact that it was the operating system for phones in China and took on all these many apps. OpenAI is coming into an ecosystem which is a lot more developed. So the web is still going to continue, apps are still going to continue. I think OpenAI also wants to connect to those and connect those to their super apps. So it'll be an operating system around the app, but also will connect to these other apps through APIs and other apps in the internet through APIs.

Marcus Johnson (06:20):

Speaking of these apps, Grace, which apps do you think will become the most useful or popular inside ChatGPT?

Grace Harmon (06:29):

I think there's going to be a really big focus on productivity and basically the ones that can act like mini experts. So scheduling assistance, trip planners, personal finance bots, things like that, tools that can handle a specific task and then use AI for the heavy lifting. I think the bigger part is going to be when they're able to start connecting with real world contacts, so your camera, your voice, your location, things like that. Maybe it can remind you to leave early because of traffic on your way to work or summarize your inbox before you open it. That latter one is, they're both on their way, there's a lot of summarization tools. But yeah, I think I just, early on we'll see a blowup of productivity tools, just anything that helps people work faster, stay organized.

Yory Wurmser (07:12):

Yeah.

Marcus Johnson (07:12):

Yory, what's top of your list?

Yory Wurmser (07:12):

I think Grace is spot-on there. I think also just vertical information providers, so Zillow I think is a great example. They provide real estate information. They're really deep on what houses are for sale, where they are. That type of app is, I think it is already an early app, but I think that category of apps are going to grow rapidly.

Marcus Johnson (07:36):

So it sounds like they want this to replace Google as kind of the gateway to the internet. Head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley did say though that, he said, "Will people spend all of their time in ChatGPT? I don't think so. I can imagine you starting your day with ChatGPT, then being guided toward other apps and websites," going on to say not all interactions with the commercial world need to be a chatbot. Where does the traffic come from? Is it just people not using Google search as much and starting their internet experience in ChatGPT? Is it just going to be a migration that's that linear?

Grace Harmon (08:20):

I think we're over to a really slow migration because people are not just not using Google search. Overall, people are not walking away from Google search, they're not walking away from traditional search engines. While there's a pick-up with AI search, it is not anywhere near replacing it. There's a huge customer base, there's a huge user base, there's a lot of demand for these tools, but Google search is not out.

Yory Wurmser (08:39):

Grace is absolutely right about the current state and even in the future, the long tail, so referrals are going to go down from search to a lot of sites, the long tail of the web is going to be hit hard by that. But the sites that have dedicated and loyal users, if you're going to New York Times directly or Zillow directly, people will still go to that directly if they have a connection to it. People will still go directly to these sites, even if they've migrated a lot of their behavior to Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever other gen AI program.

Grace Harmon (09:19):

And there's AI itself within Google search, AI overview, so that for better or for worse, for referral traffic, but there's AI users who are simultaneously Google search users.

Marcus Johnson (09:29):

Yeah. One of the interesting questions here for me was the data sharing piece here. Maxwell Zeff of TechCrunch again was talking about how the data sharing piece will work, writing key questions around apps in ChatGPT will be privacy and how much data third-party developers will have access to. OpenAI says developers must collect only the minimum data they need and be transparent about permissions. However, it's unclear whether developers would have access to a user's entire conversation with ChatGPT, the past few messages or just the prompt that summons up the app. So I think that's a really interesting piece of this 'cause that could be a significant amount of data that you're getting from someone if you're getting whole conversations versus just a couple of messages.

Grace Harmon (10:15):

Meta's on its way to doing that, to using conversations with AI bots to train its data.

Marcus Johnson (10:20):

Okay. So you think they'll probably more than likely be heading in that same direction?

Grace Harmon (10:27):

I think OpenAI, I think that they are perhaps moving a little bit more slowly with their public policies around user privacy data, just to think right out of concern and they don't have as ingrained of a position in people's lives as Meta's platforms do. So I think that it would be easier to scare people off. I think people with Meta platforms have already kind of accepted that a lot of their data is going to be used for ad targeting, for personalization. I think that it would be easier to scare people off with straight-up AI tools like OpenAI if they implement those policies too quickly.

Marcus Johnson (11:01):

Yeah. Big question here for me is the revenue model. How are they going to make money? I was reading an Economist article saying that they're expected to lose money off of $10 billion worth of revenue this year and so a lot of folks, particularly shareholders wondering how are you going to make money? There wasn't any details around the revenue sharing agreements with these partner apps, but they just introduced instant checkout. So maybe buying things through the chatbot, through these apps and also just surfacing relevant apps when the user asks for something. If you ask for a vacation homestays, Airbnb versus Vrbo could bid for priority ranking. A lot of folks using those types of, there was, this chart on the screen you can see from Criteo showing that close to 40% of Americans already say they use AI for accommodation suggestions, 20% use AI to plan their entire trip. So you could easily see a world where you're in ChatGPT and you're asking these questions about stays and these different companies are competing to be the first one that pops up and helps you to plan that trip.

(12:16):

Any thoughts on the revenue sharing model here?

Yory Wurmser (12:19):

Yeah, so I think OpenAI and probably other companies are going to have mixed monetization strategies. The revenue sharing piece is going to be part of it. I think they're moving that way with the commerce integrations that they have. I think they're going to explore affiliate model a little bit more than they have. They'll probably, almost definitely use advertising. I am doubtful that they're going to do preferred integration into the actual answers because so much is based on the trust of the answer as an agent. So I think they're going to be very cautious around doing that. Google may go a little more quickly into that, but I think OpenAI is going to be cautious around boosting recognition within an answer. But I think the advertising is going to be around those answers and I think there's no doubt to cover the costs that they have to cover, they're going to have to do advertising.

Marcus Johnson (13:24):

We touched on Google briefly saying, Grace you were saying that there's still a lot of people who are using Google and it's not this kind of great migration that we're seeing. Jeremy Kahn, Fortune's AI Editor was saying that this is the great platform shift people have been anticipating since ChatGPT debuted. Now the question is how quickly and how completely consumers and businesses will move to this model. Out of 10, how likely is this to disrupt Google, let's say, this year, and then how much so in 2026?

Grace Harmon (14:03):

I think 10 being total disruption, for this year, I'd say for OpenAI and Google maybe like two and a half.

Marcus Johnson (14:09):

Okay.

Grace Harmon (14:10):

I think it's going to be a really, really gradual change. I think that a lot of the stats that you see about however many high percent of people are planning their trips or doing all their shopping with AI, that's usually out of gen AI users, not out of general consumers. So the people who have adopted it, have adopted it really hard, but it's still only on a slow momentum. 2026, again, I don't think that in the next year we're going to see things change quite quickly as they did from 2022 to 2023 when all of these apps really broke onto the market. Like I said, I think it's going to be a pretty gradual change and it's going to take time for that trust to build up. As we see more of these app integrations coming in, the platforms become a lot more useful and I think that that is going to boost these cases a lot.

Yory Wurmser (14:52):

Yeah.

Marcus Johnson (14:53):

Yory, where do you stand?

Yory Wurmser (14:54):

I agree with 2026. I think it too sounds about right to me, it's going to have an impact, but not a very big impact, I'm sorry in 2025, I think it'll have an impact, but not a very big impact. I think 2026, I think it's going to be gradual until it gets, it'll hit some sort of inflection point. So I could see by the end of 2026 actually having a significant impact in the way we interact with the internet and with commerce. That said, it'll disrupt Google's current business model, but I think they're also pretty well positioned to be one of the winners in the new model as well. So Google as a company may actually do very well, but the old CPC model might be significantly disrupted by the end of 2026.

Marcus Johnson (15:38):

So Google has an AI mode, it has Gemini. Will Google copycat this? Will people just do the same thing, opening up apps within the Google AI model?

Yory Wurmser (15:52):

I think so. I think Google will start with its own apps. It already has a little bit, but I think much better maps integration, much better shopping integration, I think, is a no-brainer for Google. I think they're going to move quickly on that. And it makes complete sense they're going to follow with other apps as well.

Marcus Johnson (16:12):

Brian X. Chen and Tripp Mickle of The New York Times writing about the modern AI assistants, which are far more capable and flexible than the clunky voice helpers like Siri, saying they're poised to become the central OS of our personal computing devices, focusing a bit more on the device piece here, superseding smartphone software in importance, experts say. They write, the apps and their polished interfaces won't matter much when AI assistants use devices on our behalf, automatically carrying out tasks like making plans with friends, generating shopping lists and taking notes in meetings. That would spare us the need to swipe through software menus and type-on keyboards. They list AI devices in their article like Smart Glasses, ambient computers, re-imagined smartwatches. And then, Dan Gallagher of the Wall Street Journal was writing about the same topic, consumer AI devices, saying that Meta apparently believes that Apple's dominance of consumer devices is vulnerable in the AI age. Boss Mark Zuckerberg sees smart glasses as crucial to his vision, pun probably intended, for an amped-up version of AI called superintelligence.

(17:21):

Yory, what might this OS competition mean for consumer AI devices?

Yory Wurmser (17:29):

I think AI voice-based devices are going to completely run on these AI operating systems. So you see it in Alexa already with Alexa Plus, but I think cars, I think smart glasses are really going to work heavily with these AI interfaces, not just through voice, but through hand motions and things like that, nods. Phones as well. So Siri or some replacement of Siri is going to be AI operated as well, and I think it does really put Apple in a vulnerable spot. That said, I think phones are still going to be the center of our digital life for the foreseeable future.

Marcus Johnson (18:15):

Grace, I don't understand why so many people are trying to replace the smartphone. I know it makes sense if you're a company 'cause you want to be the person that sells the smartphones, but it seems like no one is asking for this. The smartphone works perfectly well, it's a tiny screen. Having a pair of glasses on your face, maybe you can talk to it and it relays information and you can live more in the real world, but you don't have that kind of visual aid that the tiny screen in your pocket offers. Is Apple vulnerable here at all, in your opinion?

Grace Harmon (18:51):

Well, I guess to your first point, I don't agree with that. I think that there is a lot of demand for these new form factors, for these new wearables. If you're looking at how the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are selling, they're really selling. And there is, I think, a lot of demand for these new devices where it's central in conversation instead of touching and swiping. With Apple, I think vulnerable is a good word. It definitely puts pressure on Apple, especially with how slowly Siri developments have been moving along. Right now, everything on your iPhone goes through iOS. But if people start spending more time talking to an AI that runs independently, then that balance shifts. If OpenAI or anyone else builds an AI-first operating system, I think that kind of rewrites the playbook. And then it's not about iOS versus Android, it's about who has the most helpful AI layer.

(19:39):

Apple's still in a really dominant position. It's got great hardware, it's got a lot of users, it's got a really tough-to-leave ecosystem. So for Apple, I think a change in power would be really gradual. But I think over time people are going to start choosing their device not just based on camera or processor, but about who has the AI ecosystem in the system that they prefer the most.

Marcus Johnson (20:01):

Interesting.

Grace Harmon (20:01):

But yeah, I think there's a lot of demand for these new form factors. I think the one that's hard to pitch probably would be a screen-less non-wearable device, just because you're not going to want to carry that around in addition to, like some sort of a pendant without a cord, something like that. It's going to be really hard to pitch people to carry something around that's similar to the function and size of their iPhone when you already have on-device AI.

Yory Wurmser (20:25):

Yeah, and Sam Altman's mystery device is reportedly one without a screen. I agree with Grace-

Grace Harmon (20:31):

Yeah.

Yory Wurmser (20:32):

... But that's hard to see how that would take off.

Grace Harmon (20:35):

And he hates smart glasses, he already said it, so it probably won't be that.

Yory Wurmser (20:38):

Yeah. Apple does have the dominant position now and their vision for AI, Apple Intelligence is really compelling and I think if they can deliver on that, they're going to be in a great spot. They just haven't shipped it, they haven't delivered on that vision, and that's, I think, what is leaving an opening for others.

Marcus Johnson (20:56):

That's unfortunately where we have to leave the conversation for today. Well, thank you so much to my guests for being part of it. Thank you first to Yory.

Yory Wurmser (21:03):

Great to be here as always.

Marcus Johnson (21:05):

And of course to Grace.

Grace Harmon (21:06):

Thanks for having me, guys.

Marcus Johnson (21:08):

Yes, indeed. And thank you to the whole editing crew and to everyone for listening in to Behind the Numbers, new market video podcast made possible by Fetch. Make sure you subscribe and follow and leave a rating and review. We'll be back on Monday. Happiest of weekends.