How chat apps could usher in a new wave of services that are easier to deploy and access
2016 will be the year of conversational commerce — As — I've surveyed the landscape collecting startups and apps that fit into this paradigm, talked with the press, observed how marketers …
Context & Ripple Effects
Chris Messina's '2016 will be the year of conversational commerce' thesis landed on fertile ground: Facebook had already opened Messenger to third-party apps and business communication in 2015, and Line was stretching chat apps into media with a YouTube-like video service. The bet was that services could live inside chat threads rather than behind app-store installs.
A decade of coverage has stress-tested that prediction in both directions. A WeChat product manager argued chat apps win by removing friction like installation, login, and payment rather than by conversational UI for its own sake; Facebook's 2016 chatbot platform launch tested the thesis at scale; Berlin-based Charles raised $20M from Salesforce Ventures in 2022 to sell over WhatsApp; and OpenAI's MCP-based Apps SDK now brings the same pattern to ChatGPT.
First-order effects
- Businesses gain a distribution channel where discovery, purchase, and support happen inside an existing messaging thread — no app install, separate login, or checkout flow required, exactly the friction removal the WeChat PM identified as the success condition.
- Platform owners (Facebook then, OpenAI now) become gatekeepers: developers must build to each platform's SDK and accept its submission process, as OpenAI's later-2025 app submissions window makes explicit.
Second-order effects
- A service layer emerges between platforms and merchants — Charles's WhatsApp commerce tooling shows startups can arbitrage the gap between raw messaging APIs and what businesses actually need to sell and support.
- App stores face competition as the default unit of software distribution; when apps are submitted to ChatGPT or deployed into Messenger instead, the store's install-and-payment tollbooth loses leverage over conversational channels.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, software distribution consolidates around a few conversation surfaces whose owners control both the interface and the transaction layer — shifting platform power from OS-level app stores to AI/messaging gatekeepers, with the same dependency risks developers already accepted under Facebook and now OpenAI.
- Commerce and support converge into a single assistant-mediated surface, making the quality of the underlying model and the platform's commerce rails — not brand apps — the competitive battleground.
The trend: Conversational commerce is maturing from a 2016 prediction about chat bots into model-platform app ecosystems, where OpenAI's SDK-era ChatGPT plays the gatekeeper role Messenger once did.