Apps in ChatGPT reviews: What businesses need to know in 2025

OpenAI is shaking things up. They’re turning ChatGPT from a (very smart) chatbot into an interactive platform with something new called "Apps." Suddenly, you can plan a whole trip or mock up a presentation without ever leaving the chat.

It sounds cool, and for personal use, it mostly is. But if you’re running a business, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. You get a new way to connect with customers, sure, but it also raises some serious questions about control, security, and whether it’s really cut out for something as important as customer support.

So, let’s get into a real, honest review of Apps in ChatGPT. We’ll look at what they’re good for, where they completely miss the mark for support teams, and how they compare to AI tools that were actually built for the job.

What are Apps in ChatGPT?

Think of Apps in ChatGPT as little add-ons that let it do more. They’re third-party integrations you can use right in the middle of a conversation, giving ChatGPT specific skills or access to live information it wouldn’t have otherwise.

The whole thing feels pretty smooth. You can directly tell it to use an app, like, "Spotify, build me a playlist for focusing," or ChatGPT might just suggest one if it seems relevant. For example, if you start talking about fixing up your kitchen, it might bring up the Zillow app.

This all runs on a new Apps SDK, which uses something called the Model Context Protocol (MCP). All that really means is it’s the tech that lets ChatGPT communicate with other tools. According to OpenAI’s announcement, the first batch of apps included names like Canva, Booking.com, and Zillow, which tells you they’re definitely starting with a consumer focus.

A screenshot providing a ChatGPT overview of its content generation capabilities by showing a drafted marketing email.

The potential benefits for businesses

Before we dive into the problems, let’s give credit where it’s due. These apps have some interesting potential for businesses, even if they aren’t a full-blown support solution.

A new way to chat with customers

For brands in fields like travel or e-commerce, these apps open up a new conversational marketing channel. Companies like Expedia and Booking.com are already on board, letting people plan and discover trips right in the chat. It’s a pretty slick way to meet customers where they already are and guide them from a vague idea to a potential booking.

Speeding up simple, creative tasks

Your internal teams could get some real mileage out of this, too. You could brainstorm marketing copy and then ask the Canva app to sketch out a presentation, or use a Figma app to quickly visualize a user flow. For straightforward creative work that doesn’t touch sensitive company data, these apps can be a nice little shortcut.

Getting real-time information

One of the long-standing complaints about ChatGPT has been its knowledge cutoff. Apps help fix that by pulling in live data from the web. An app can fetch current flight prices or pull up today’s real estate listings, making ChatGPT’s answers a lot more useful for time-sensitive questions.

The reality check: Limitations for support teams

While the potential is interesting, when you take a closer look, it becomes obvious that Apps in ChatGPT weren’t designed for the grind of a professional support or IT team. When your job is to deliver fast, accurate, and secure help, you need a level of control that these apps just don’t provide.

You have zero control over business workflows

This is the biggest deal-breaker. With an app in ChatGPT, you can’t tell it which customer questions to handle, what tone to use, or what to do when it inevitably gets stuck. The entire interaction is driven by the user, meaning you can’t build reliable workflows or create paths for escalation. You can’t test it, you can’t see how it would have handled your past tickets, and you can’t roll it out to a small group first. You basically just have to turn it on and hope for the best.

A tool actually built for support, like eesel AI, puts you in the driver’s seat. It has a simulation mode that lets you test your AI agent on thousands of your real past tickets. This gives you a clear forecast of its resolution rate and lets you tweak its behavior before it ever talks to a customer, so you can go live without crossing your fingers.

Knowledge is siloed and generic

Each app is its own little island. The Expedia app knows travel and the Canva app knows design, but none of them know a single thing about your business. They can’t answer questions about your return policy, troubleshoot your specific product, or explain your pricing.

A proper support AI has to learn from a knowledge base that is unique to your company. A specialized platform like eesel AI gets this right away. It connects to all your knowledge sources, from your public Zendesk help center to your team’s private notes in Confluence or guides in Google Docs. It even learns from your past tickets to pick up your brand’s voice and common solutions from day one.

They can’t take action in your help desk

Apps in ChatGPT can give answers, but they can’t do anything inside your support tools. They can’t tag a ticket, route an urgent issue to the right person, or update a customer’s profile in your help desk.

This leads to conversational dead ends. The customer might get an answer, but your support team has no record of it and no clear next step. Agents end up having to manually copy and paste information to complete tasks that should have been automated, which kind of defeats the whole point. A real AI support tool comes with a workflow engine you can customize. For instance, eesel AI can be set up to automatically triage tickets, add the right tags, escalate to a human, or even call an external API to check on an order status.

Data privacy and security are a big question mark

When a customer chats with a third-party app in ChatGPT, where is that conversation data going? Using these apps means sharing potentially sensitive customer info with another company, which creates a tangled mess of compliance and security risks. For any business that takes customer data seriously, this is a huge red flag.

You need straightforward data policies you can count on. Platforms like eesel AI are built with security as a priority. We promise your data is never used to train general AI models, and we provide enterprise-level security features like EU data residency and the use of SOC 2 Type II-certified subprocessors.

Pricing for business use

To use this for any real business purpose, you’ll need to be on either the ChatGPT Business or Enterprise plan. These plans add important security and admin features, like making sure your conversations aren’t used to train OpenAI’s public models.

But even with a paid plan, you’re still using a general-purpose tool. You’re paying for access to a powerful AI, but not one that’s fine-tuned for support workflows. The per-user pricing can also get expensive and clunky for a support team, where you might have many agents who only need to use it now and then.

Here’s a quick look at the plans meant for businesses:

Feature	ChatGPT Business	ChatGPT Enterprise
Pricing	$25/user/month (billed annually)	Contact Sales
Data Privacy	Data excluded from training by default	Everything in Business + custom retention
Security	SAML SSO, MFA, dedicated workspace	Enterprise-grade controls (SCIM, analytics)
Integrations	Connectors (Google Drive, SharePoint, etc.)	Custom integrations, expanded context
Support	Standard	24/7 priority support, SLAs

Why a specialized AI tool is the better alternative

When you stack up the limitations, it’s pretty clear that for a job as important as customer support, you need a tool that was designed for that specific purpose. Here’s how a platform like eesel AI solves the problems you’d run into with a generic tool like ChatGPT.

Get started in minutes, not months

Building a custom app for ChatGPT takes developers and time spent fiddling with the Apps SDK. In contrast, eesel AI is designed so anyone can use it. You can connect your help desk with one click and have a working AI agent running in just a few minutes. You don’t have to schedule a sales call or sit through a boring demo just to see if it’s a good fit.

Connect all your knowledge, not just one app

Instead of being stuck with what a single, isolated app knows, eesel AI builds a hyper-personalized AI by training on all of your company’s data. It learns from past support tickets, internal docs, and help articles to give answers that are actually relevant to your business.

A screenshot of the eesel AI integrations page, showing how a specialized tool connects to business systems, which is a limitation in the ChatGPT vs. Claude comparison for support.

Automate tasks with a customizable workflow engine

A support tool needs to do more than just talk. The eesel AI Agent and AI Triage products are built to automate entire processes. They can route, tag, escalate, and even close tickets, freeing up your agents to handle the tricky issues that really need a human touch.

Test with confidence and get clear pricing

With eesel AI, you never have to guess how your AI is going to perform. The risk-free simulation mode shows you exactly how effective it will be before you flip the switch. On top of that, our pricing is straightforward and predictable. We don’t hit you with surprise per-resolution fees, so your bill won’t suddenly jump just because you had a busy month.

Final thoughts: Pick the right tool for the job

Our Apps in ChatGPT reviews show that they’re a fascinating step forward, making AI more interactive for everyday tasks. They give us a peek into a future where AI is woven into everything we do.

But for the specific, high-stakes needs of a professional customer support team, they just aren’t the right tool. If your business needs reliable, secure, and deeply connected support automation, you’re much better off with a specialized platform built from the ground up for that exact purpose.

Ready to see what a purpose-built AI support agent can do for your team? Start your free trial with eesel AI and get set up in minutes, or book a demo to learn more.