VESTA
Request access
[← BACK]//[PREDICTION]//

Soon, AI assistants will sign up your customers for you

By Laura Parfitt // 6 min read

In the last post I covered how the Claude and ChatGPT marketplaces rank connectors by usage, and how to play that game today. This one is a prediction: within a few quarters, AI assistants will suggest your product to someone mid-task, sign them up, and have them using it before the conversation ends. It doesn't work that way today, and the reason it doesn't tells you a lot about where this channel is heading.

Today, the marketplace only reaches people who already know you

Connecting an app to Claude or ChatGPT almost always requires an existing account with the provider. The connection flow is an OAuth login: the user has to sign in to your product before the assistant can act on their behalf. No account, no connection.

That constraint shapes the whole funnel. The person browsing the directory and connecting your app is, with rare exceptions, already your customer. They found you somewhere else, signed up somewhere else, and the marketplace is where they deepen the relationship rather than where it starts. However good your listing, however high your rank, the channel mostly reaches people who could already log in.

So these marketplaces today are retention infrastructure. That's valuable, and worth the effort covered in the last post, since a customer whose assistant uses your product daily is a customer who doesn't churn. But it isn't customer acquisition, and anyone evaluating the channel on new-customer numbers this year will conclude it doesn't work. They'll be right, but not for long.

The wall is coming down in pieces

Three recent moves from the platforms point the same way.

Assistants already suggest apps mid-conversation. OpenAI's launch material for apps describes ChatGPT suggesting relevant apps during a conversation, using the example of surfacing Zillow when someone discusses buying a home. Anthropic's directory documentation says connectors are eligible for Suggested Connectors, in-chat recommendations when relevant to the user's task. In both cases the assistant can put an app in front of a user who never went looking for it. The suggestion arrives at the moment of need, which is a moment no search ad or app store feature has ever had this kind of access to.

Google just entered, and its version is built on personal context. In July, Google added Connected Apps to AI Mode in Search, starting with Instacart, Canva and YouTube Music. The launch examples show where this goes: a barbecue in your calendar becomes a suggested Instacart order, an upcoming event shapes which Canva templates appear. Google is wiring app suggestions to what it knows about your life, and it is doing this inside Search, which still reaches more people than any of the assistants. The launch set is small and partner-negotiated, with no open submission process yet, but Google says more partners are coming.

Checkout is moving inside the conversation. OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol already supports completing purchases without leaving ChatGPT. Once payment works in-conversation, adding signup to the same flow is a small step.

Put the pieces in a row: suggestion at the moment of need, personal context deciding which app gets suggested, and transactions completing inside the chat. The one missing piece is account creation in the same flow. Every incentive points at building it, because a suggestion that dead-ends at "go sign up on their website first" loses most users, and the platforms know it.

The unglamorous work comes first

There's a reason the wall hasn't fallen already, and it isn't lack of ambition. In-flow signup means an assistant creating accounts, holding permissions and moving money on a user's behalf. Before any platform lets that happen at scale, three dull, hard problems have to be solved well: identity, authorisation and payments. That's where the effort is going right now.

You can see it in what the platforms mandate and in what the ecosystem still gets wrong. Both marketplaces require OAuth 2.1 for anything touching private data, plus explicit safety annotations on every tool, and both run manual review before listing. Meanwhile a scan of over 8,000 public MCP servers found more than a third with SSRF vulnerabilities, and around 40% of servers in the official registry running with no authentication at all. The gap between those two facts is the wall. Platforms gate hard because the average server doesn't yet deserve the trust that in-flow signup requires.

Payments are furthest along, with the Agentic Commerce Protocol already moving real money through ChatGPT, and identity is the pattern app platforms have solved before: the App Store's answer was Sign in with Apple, and the equivalent for assistants is an obvious thing for each platform to build. So the timing signal to watch isn't feature announcements. It's the boring infrastructure: standardised agent-friendly signup, payment rails maturing, security baselines rising across the ecosystem. When those pieces are in place, nothing else stands between a suggestion and a new customer, and the channel opens fast.

What the channel looks like after

When that last piece lands, the sequence inverts. Instead of "become a customer, then connect the app", it becomes "the assistant suggests an app you've never heard of, mid-task, and you're signed up and using it before the conversation ends".

At that point these marketplaces stop being retention infrastructure and become acquisition channels, plugged into the highest-intent moments that exist. And the question of which app gets suggested, out of hundreds in a category, becomes commercially decisive in a way it isn't today.

Some of that decision will be commercial. Google is building ad placements inside AI Mode in parallel with Connected Apps, and OpenAI has announced ad plans for parts of ChatGPT. Big companies will negotiate placement, as the launch partners already have. But suggestion quality cuts the other way: an assistant that recommends apps which fail its users damages its own product, so the platforms have a lasting incentive to weight suggestions towards apps that work well when agents use them. Usage history, task success, error rates. The signals a model can observe directly.

This is the practical point. The rank and usage base you build now, during the retention era, is the track record the suggestion systems will draw on when the discovery era arrives. The companies that treated the channel as marginal because "it only reaches our existing customers" will be starting from zero exactly when starting position matters most.

What to do about it, in one paragraph

None of it is exotic. Get listed, drive your existing customers onto the channel, and make the agent experience good enough that usage compounds, all covered in the last post. The addition this post argues for is patience with the numbers: measure the channel this year on retention and usage depth, not new customers, and treat every active user as a deposit towards the moment the account wall comes down. On current evidence, that moment is quarters away, not years.

Sources

If you build a surface that agents use, and you want to know how they actually use it, Vesta is in early access.

Request early access →Back to blog