Preview of OpenAI Developer Day: What is the legendary "consumer-grade AI product"?
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OpenAI will hold its Developer Day event on October 6th, with market expectations that the company will launch new consumer-grade AI agent products and possibly release an AI browser to challenge Google Chrome's position. These potential releases would mark an important transformation for OpenAI from relying on the ChatGPT subscription model to a diversified product portfolio.
On October 6th, according to ZF Trading Desk, UBS stated in its latest research report that OpenAI is seeking substantial growth on top of its current $13 billion revenue, aiming for an ambitious $200 billion goal by 2030. To achieve this, the company must find new growth engines beyond its core ChatGPT business.
After comprehensive industry research, analysts predict that the upcoming OpenAI Developer Day on October 6th will focus mainly on releasing consumer-grade AI products. In addition to the instant checkout feature and personalized AI agent ChatGPT Pulse already launched, travel booking agents are considered one of the key directions.
The report also points out that many industry observers predict OpenAI may launch an AI browser to challenge Chrome, further integrating user data and product access points. With 95% of its 700 million users still being free users, the potential for an advertising revenue model also presents OpenAI with increasingly diversified profit prospects.
ChatGPT: OpenAI’s Growth Engine
UBS says that, according to financial data reported by the media, about 80% of OpenAI’s current revenue comes from its core ChatGPT subscription service.
Tech media The Information reports that OpenAI achieved $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025, higher than the full-year revenue for 2024, putting the company on track to hit its $13 billion revenue target for 2025, nearly tripling year-over-year.
ChatGPT’s user growth is remarkable: weekly active users have grown from 200 million this time last year to 700 million now, an increase of 250% year-over-year. This growth rate is nearly in line with OpenAI’s overall revenue growth, confirming ChatGPT’s status as the main growth engine. At the current rate, ChatGPT is expected to surpass 1 billion users by the end of the year.
In terms of user composition, OpenAI recently disclosed that the number of paid enterprise users has exceeded 5 million, a 60% increase from 3 million in June. If the estimate of 35 million total paid users is accurate, enterprise users account for about 15% of the paid user base. However, industry observers think Developer Day is unlikely to focus on new enterprise-level features.
The report says that OpenAI’s current API services are expected to bring in about $2 billion in revenue in 2025, accounting for 15% of total revenue. However, several sources say that instead of relying on third parties to build products via API, OpenAI prefers to productize its own models to capture greater value.
For developer tools, OpenAI may announce functional upgrades to its Codex agent. The company has also released a video generation tool, Sora 2, competing with Google Veo and Runway in the creative AI field.
Consumer-Grade AI Agents: The Next Growth Spot
UBS states in the report that, based on industry feedback, it expects OpenAI to focus on launching new consumer-grade AI agent products based on ChatGPT.
UBS notes that ahead of Developer Day, OpenAI has already launched two key products as previews:
Instant Checkout Feature: "From chat to checkout" service launched in cooperation with Stripe, allowing users to buy products directly from Etsy and Shopify sellers.
After the feature went live, Etsy stock rose 16% and Shopify rose 6% in a day, reflecting the market's positive reaction to AI e-commerce integration.
ChatGPT Pulse: As a preview of a personalized AI agent, Pulse actively researches topics and provides users with curated content based on knowledge from personalized conversations, prompts, and connected applications (like Gmail and Calendar).
Industry sources also note that OpenAI may launch a more powerful travel booking agent, leveraging its model’s strengths in travel-related data training.
AI Browsers: A New Battlefield
Several industry observers predict that OpenAI may launch an AI browser, emulating Perplexity’s Comet browser. This would become the entry point for OpenAI’s agent application suite, challenging Google Chrome’s dominance.
UBS notes that the browser market is currently dominated by Google Chrome, followed by Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Edge. The emergence of AI browsers is disrupting this relatively stable landscape.
In 2025, Perplexity launched Comet, Atlassian acquired The Browser Company for $600 million, and Google integrated its Gemini AI model into Chrome.
Microsoft has made it clear it will enhance its existing Edge browser rather than create a new one, implementing agent features through Copilot.
In contrast, OpenAI's strategy in launching a standalone AI browser may be to compete more directly with Google while providing a better user data aggregation tool for its consumer-grade agent products.
UBS analyst Stephen Ju believes:
OpenAI’s strategic motivation for developing a browser is similar to Google’s original motive for Chrome — to ensure users have a secure channel to access its own services, while also collecting valuable user behavior data.
Advertising Revenue Model In Sight
UBS says it’s unlikely to be announced at this Developer Day, but multiple sources are certain that OpenAI will eventually launch an advertising revenue model.
Given that about 95% of its 700 million users are free users, advertising can not only generate direct revenue but also motivate free users to upgrade to a paid, ad-free version.
An industry observer said:
"On advertising, I’m almost certain they will go this route. What’s uncertain is the specific implementation—whether to display ads on the same page, or more cleverly insert ads based on questions or prompts."
Product Expansion Will Impact Google, Meta, and Others
OpenAI’s product expansion will mainly impact existing players in the consumer internet space (Google, Meta, and Microsoft), while compute-intensive new products will benefit infrastructure providers like Oracle.
Consumer Internet Companies: OpenAI’s potential new agent products (shopping, personal productivity, travel) as well as its AI browser and advertising business mainly target the consumer market, so the impact on companies like Google and Meta will be more direct.
Microsoft: Though there is cooperation, OpenAI has already become a direct competitor to Microsoft in two key AI application areas—M365 Copilot (via ChatGPT Enterprise) and GitHub Copilot (via Codex and GPT-5). Launching an AI browser will further intensify competition.
Infrastructure Providers: Any new product that helps OpenAI achieve its financial forecasts will benefit its cloud-computing partners like Microsoft Azure, Oracle OCI, and CoreWeave. The more compute-intensive the product, the more beneficial for infrastructure investors.
Enterprise Software Market: If OpenAI mainly focuses on consumer-grade product releases, the impact on enterprise software stocks may be limited. However, the internal AI usage video OpenAI released this week already affected the share prices of DocuSign (down 12%), HubSpot (down 10%), and Braze (down 12%).
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The above content comes from ZF Trading Desk.
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