OpenAI DevDay: Dots, Agents & $100B Opportunities

0:00I got to be real with you. I didn't think I'd be making this episode of the podcast, but I just watched almost 60 minutes of Sam Altman up on stage and he launched a few things that I think are going to make people in aggregate billions of dollars. And I don't think that's a stretch. I think that there were 20 feature launches today, but I think there was probably three or four that are so big that I think the people who figure out how to use those features and to grab a slice of those billions of dollars of transactions that are going to be happening within the ChatGPT platform, I think they're going to be able to create some really, really big businesses.

0:43So I had to come on here and just break it down for you. If you're new here, my name is Greg Eisenberg. I'm the host of the Startup Ideas podcast. I started and sold three venture-backed companies. I was an advisor to Reddit, TikTok. And I come on here because I think that this is an incredible time to be building your ideas. And I think that in the AJAI, you can use tools like this to go and do that. So by the end of this episode, you're going to learn about the most important things that happened today that Sam Altman launched at Dev Day 2026. I'm going to give you some ideas and some frameworks for thinking about how you could come up with your own ideas so that you can grab a slice of that pie.

1:25And I'm just going to cut through the noise. So you're by the end of it. I'm just going to I'm just going to really focus on for people interested in building businesses, making money around AI. This is the episode for you.

1:49So, yes, like I said, there are 20 plus launches, feature launches today. The most important ones to me, the ones I think are the most interesting, and I think maybe for you, is let's start with Dots. So we have to talk about Dots. Dots is the personal agent platform. and it's their answer to Muse by Meta and their answer to Instinct. And what's really cool about it is they now have this front door where you're going to have access to the 1.2 billion weekly active users. That's what Sam Altman said today. so you know people are going to go and use their personal agent platform dots and they're going to be asking questions right they're going to say i need this permit fixed or i have this request or you know i'm looking for a restaurant that you know serves this and chat gpt is going to understand that job and uh your plugin that you have made which is essentially like a mini app is going to get selected for the work and we're going to talk about ways to surface that.

3:06But they've basically announced that plugins, they're doubling down on plugins. I think Sam said something around like, he didn't say verbatim that plugins were a failure. He didn't say that. But he did say something to the degree, I'm paraphrasing that they had some mixed reviews on plugins. They're now doubling down on plugins. And I believe, Sam, that he's going to make plugins a thing and he's going to try to make ChatGPT the app ecosystem for AI. And that's a huge announcement of today. And we're going to talk about some of the things. We'll go deeper on that. So you want your business to go and fix the customer's request, file the permit you know if it's an you know an example of like a permit company and then you're going to want to do the result so this is the new app ecosystem you need to drill this into your brain you you know have to figure out how you could focus on the right customer chat gpt is going to understand the job so they're going to do that you're going to have to create the right plugin that does the right thing and actually creates a growth result.

4:26Because if you can do that, you know, you can be hired before the customer knows your name. You can have access to the 1.2 billion weekly active users. And we're talking about, like, you know, I said in the intro, like billions of dollars of transactions. I'm even being conservative. Like, I don't think it's crazy to say that in 10, 15, 20 years that there's trillions of dollars of transaction volume happening within personal agent platforms. But let's be conservative and say that there are billions of dollars that will be in transaction volume. So now that we understand that, let's go back to DevDay's website.

5:07So you can see here's their personal agent platform. The other thing that they announced today is Decisions API. I did a video, I think it was last week, on Jev. And this is their answer to Jev. So you saw their answer to Muse. This is their answer to Jev. Decisions API enables real-time decision-making by focusing Luna's intelligence on a specific set of user-defined questions with finite predefined answers. So developers supply context using text or images and they get back answers they can use Choose to classify content, route request, or choose an agent's next action. So it's in limited preview today.

5:50Excited to play around with it. I've been hooked on Jev. Hooked on Jev. I think there's a bunch of use cases for Jev that people are not talking about. It's underserved. One that I think is really interesting is just UI design. How do you use, essentially, Jeff is a decisions API. How do you use a decisions API to get you the most highly converted converting app store screenshots or direct response websites and apps, things like that? So there's a ton of opportunity there. The question here is, will OpenAI's Decision API be worse, as good, or better than JEV? TBD, we will find out really soon, but I think it's worth paying attention to.

6:43The other big launch of today that I think is really interesting is the Agents API is with computer use. So the Agents API now supports computer use so developers can build agents that interact with software to complete tasks. Git also brings Codex's multi-agent capabilities, tool search, tool calling, and context compaction into your application. OpenAI runs the underlying infrastructure so your team can focus on building applications. I've talked about this before around vertical harnesses. You can see here, it's a managed Codex harness. harness so you know if you have you know great data if you have a great brand if you understand a vertical better than other people you know there's this huge opportunity to build apps and that's why i would be playing with the agent api today like go and figure out you know what you can be building how you can extend yourself uh extend your business to to this world and this is just like a new surface area it's like thinking about how you can create AI native apps and it's just I think there's a lot here I don't think a lot of people are doing it and obviously that excites me the other like low key huge announcements I don't even know if it's I don't even know if it's on this page that's how low key it is but when I saw it it sort of blew my mind but basically you can now sign in with your chat gbt login and use your token allowance and on those websites this is going to open up thousands of business opportunities in the same way that when facebook launched their login it opened up thousands of business opportunities and actually created many billions, billion dollar companies.

8:46Think about Yelp as an example. I remember when Yelp came out, it was basically, and you can go check out what their early product looked like. Multi-billion dollar company that was basically, log in with your Facebook and you're going to see local reviews and reviews that your friends have given. And it had that Facebook graph so it allowed you to do more. now where do i see the opportunity we're going to go we're going to go into depth into this in a bit but where i see the opportunity with sign in with chat gpt is now you can create a free app you don't charge people so you get your top of the funnel becomes bigger it's connected with your chat gpt and then you can upsell them to other products and services from there that is a huge huge huge thing let's go back here here's my my word dump of chat gpt login.

9:43I think a lot of people look at AI apps and they're like, do I really want to spend$20 or$30 a month for another AI app? It's like, no. You can just sign in with ChatGPT and start using the plan you already have. So I think a lot of people if you're smart, you create your core app free and then you charge for advanced features. So you can charge for enterprise stuff. You can charge for sharing with your team. You can charge for more data. But now you have this opportunity to create the core app for free. In the past, you couldn't create the core app for free because you were paying for inference, right?

10:19But now you can just focus on your business, building the distribution, building the brand, getting the data sets, obviously getting those people from the brand into the app, get them to use the app, and when they start seeing value, upsell them to other things. A few ideas around what you can do with the login. An agent that cleans architectural CAD files. A researcher that monitors one specific scientific field. A Shopify catalog cleanup desktop app. A video production tool built around one repeatable editing workflow. A contract review tool for one type of franchise agreement. Basically, what's the opportunity?

11:06these tiny AI categories that weren't viable, weren't economically viable today as of today are. So you want to build these products that are too niche to become major open AI features but you have enough of an audience that you can charge something for upselling and for that workflow. So I think this is a really big deal. And I'm really excited about it. My mind is going absolutely, I can't stop thinking about it actually. And now we can focus on selling workflows, right? Yeah, sell workflows instead of tokens. So if you're ideating, if you want to build a business in this agentic age, what's some proprietary information that you have?

12:00A specialist workflow, access to outside systems, collaboration and auditability, a network of human or suppliers, a measurable business result. These are the things we can focus on and we don't need to really focus on tokens. And I think you're also just going to get a lot more users of your app. You get their emails, you might get their phone numbers and then you could email them. You can sell ads in those emails. There's just so much more that you can do now that I think it's really, really interesting. I wanted to just talk about the mental model I have of this new world where we have decisions API, we have login with ChatGPT, we have dots, we have the agents API.

12:49How am I thinking about building a business in this world? To me, it's this four-step framework, trigger, decision, action, and feedback. So there's going to be a trigger, an invoice becomes due, the inventory runs low or it's tax time like something happens such that i'm going to chat gpt and i'm asking for some help or it does it autonomously then there's a decision so chat gpt is like okay what should i do next um then there's an action so it you know there's a correct there's a submit there's an ability for uh an application to do something and then there's feedback um you Was it approved?

13:30Was it rejected? And I think that the strongest businesses are going to own two of three. So they're going to own trigger, they're going to own action and feedback. So when you're thinking and you're brainstorming around what you can be building, I would be focused on those three things. I wanted to give you a couple ideas just to get your creative juices flowing around, okay, what other businesses could you build now that Sam Altman and OpenAI team have launched this? one is like a real world API so in a world where you're going to have millions of people basically going to dots and asking it for stuff some of those stuff are going to be digital but some of them some of those are going to be digital some of them are going to be structured jobs so if you can figure out a way to get vetted specialists in the real world I think that that's a huge opportunity so like permanent expediters custom brokers and then you make a transaction fee so I think my point is there's all this stuff happening in the physical real world a lot of people are going to be focusing on the digital stuff how can you create real world work APIs in specific niches that you can connect dots or connect chat GPT to real world workers who can finish the last mile of the transaction.

15:00Huge opportunity throwing it out there. The second is who's going to build the analytics and optimization layer for agent discovery? So I'm not the only one who's thinking about building plugins right now. At this very moment, there's probably thousands of companies thinking about how the hell do I get surface within dots? Not just dots. How do I get surface within Muse? How do I get surface within Gemini? Google's platform. I think it's called Spark. There's all these personal agent platforms. Instinct. There's all these platforms. GrokBot. How do you get your plug-in surface? Some of these have plug-ins.

15:46Some of them don't. But I think eventually they all will um if you can create like an analytics platform uh that shows um that actually i have it here that generates realistic indirect prompts which measures which plugin gets selected which tracks activation share by customer intent which finds metadata and tool definition problems with which measures whether invocation turns into completion test every plugin update there's a huge opportunity here in the same way that uh in the web era you had huge companies mix panel came out amplitude came out google analytics was a huge product i think there's tons of analytics products that are going to come out around helping you be seen and you're you actually saw that with aeo geo i mean i think profound raised at like a two billion valuation or billion dollar valuation, some absurd large amount.

16:47They deserve it. They're generating a ton of buzz and revenue and they're solving a real problem. My point is, who's going to be the profound for this personal agent era? Huge opportunity. I hope someone takes that. so um i'll i'll end with they obviously launched other stuff they've obviously launched gpt 6.1 which was huge which is obviously a major upgrade to gpt6 but um we kind of expected that they obviously launched ultrafast which now uh which is amazing by the way if you haven't tried ultrafast It's absolutely amazing. You're going to love it. It's just way faster. Of course, it's a lot more tokens, but of course they launched this.

17:37And they obviously launched private intelligence, which I think a lot of companies are scared to use Frontier AI because their data isn't really protected. So I'm not surprised that they're doing things like that and doing stuff like Codex Security Cloud. But I think the point of this whole episode was there's a few main features, decision API, agents API, the login with ChatGPT and Dots that I think if you're listening to this, you're a founder or you're someone who wants to build a company, wants to bet on yourself.

18:14That's going to be huge. and they also launched Spaces which is basically their version of having cloud slides and docs and you can bring your AI agent to work with it so yeah it's cool and it's going to help make people more productive but for people listening to this, for my people for the idea junkies, the people who want to build businesses I thought this would be most interesting to you hope it was, let me know if it was I read every single comment YouTube comment I reply to a lot of them too and have a creative day and I'll see you next time