Imagine only needing to use a single app.
You can message friends with it. Pay bills. Order dinner. Book a doctor’s appointment. Shop online. Watch videos. Call a rideshare. Transfer money. Even manage your investments.
And you never need to switch to another app.
The idea of this kind of “super app” has been floating around Silicon Valley for years. A single digital hub that handles nearly every part of your daily life.
But here’s the thing…
It already exists. And it’s called WeChat.
Originally launched as a simple messaging app by Tencent, WeChat has grown into a powerhouse. More than 1.4 billion people use it every month.
Its users can chat with friends, pay for groceries, hail taxis, book travel, order food, play games and access millions of services without ever leaving the app.
In 2024 alone, WeChat Pay processed tens of trillions of dollars worth of transactions, making it one of the largest digital payment networks in the world.
But even though many technology companies in the U.S. have tried to build its American counterpart, we still spend our days jumping from app to app.
Artificial intelligence could be about to change that.
Because the companies leading the AI race today are all trying to build something remarkably similar to WeChat.
But if they’re successful, the “everything app” of the future won’t be a social network, a search engine or even a smartphone operating system.
It’ll be an AI assistant.
The New Operating System
Technology companies have historically competed to own specific categories.
Google captured search. Meta dominates social networking. Amazon owns online shopping. And PayPal rules digital payments.
But each service lives inside its own app, meaning users have to bounce between them all day long.
The super app promises to change that by bringing everything into one place.
That’s what made WeChat so powerful in China. Once enough services moved into the app, people stopped thinking of it as a messaging platform and started treating it as part of their everyday lives.
Now, some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence are trying to build something similar. But instead of organizing everything around a social network, they’re organizing it around an AI assistant.
And each company is taking a different path to get there.
Elon Musk has been the most open about his ambitions.
When he purchased Twitter in 2022, he repeatedly described X as an “everything app.”
At the time, many investors assumed he was talking about social media, video and creator content.
But the missing piece was always payments.
Over the past two years, X quietly obtained money transmitter licenses across roughly 40 states and Washington, D.C. The company also partnered with Visa to launch X Money, which allows users to fund a digital wallet, send money to other users and transfer funds back to a bank account through Visa Direct.
Sure, that doesn’t sound revolutionary. After all, PayPal already lets people send money. Venmo does too.
But as I predicted months ago, Musk isn’t trying to build another payment app.
He’s trying to remove the need to leave X.
Because the longer users stay inside his platform, the more opportunities it has to sell services, facilitate transactions and collect valuable data about what they want.
That’s essentially the same playbook that helped turn WeChat into one of the most influential apps in the world.
Anthropic, however, is approaching the problem from a completely different direction.
Rather than starting with consumers, it is starting with knowledge workers.
Over the past year, Claude has evolved from a chatbot into something much closer to a digital workspace. Through its Model Context Protocol, or MCP, Claude can connect to files, calendars, databases and third-party software.
The company has also introduced interactive integrations that allow users to work directly with applications such as Slack, Figma, Canva and Asana without constantly switching between tabs.
So instead of asking Claude a question and copying the answer somewhere else, you can now stay inside Claude while it interacts with other software on your behalf.
In effect, Claude is starting to look less like a chatbot and more like a new kind of workspace.
OpenAI appears to be heading toward a similar destination.
ChatGPT reaches roughly 900 million weekly active users, giving OpenAI one of the largest distribution platforms in technology. And according to recent reports, the company is preparing a major overhaul of ChatGPT that places greater emphasis on agents, coding tools and third-party services.
It’s already taken several steps in that direction.
Last year, OpenAI launched Apps inside ChatGPT, allowing users to interact with services such as Booking.com, Expedia, Spotify, Canva, Zillow and Figma without ever leaving the chat interface.
Developers can also build new applications directly for ChatGPT through the company’s Apps SDK.
And as that ecosystem continues expanding, ChatGPT will look less like a chatbot and more like an operating system.
Here’s My Take
In the world of AI, distribution is becoming just as important as intelligence.
After all, the company that controls the interface controls the relationship with the user.
Just as Google became the front door to the web and Apple became the front door to mobile apps, AI companies are racing to become the front door to digital services.
Meaning, the most dominant AI company might not end up being the one with the smartest model…
But the one that becomes the place where people work, shop, communicate, create and spend all their time online.
Regards,
Ian King
Chief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing
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