Daybreak - ChatGPT is everywhere. Not everyone is impressed

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Last week, ChatGPT launched its own AI browser — a tool that promises to surf the web for you. It can summarise articles, add chocolates to your cart, or even tell you which email to reply to first (though… not always correctly). OpenAI’s vision is clear: make ChatGPT the centre of your digital life. But are users buying in? From buggy app integrations with Canva and Spotify to real concerns around privacy and data access, host Rachel Varghese explores why AI-powered tools aren’t quite the game-changers they claim to be — yet. And why OpenAI keeps rolling them out anyway. Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording.

Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Just last week, OpenAI launched its own AI browser called Atlas. Now, AI browsers are supposed to be the next big web intervention.

So it's no surprise that one of the world's most well-known AI companies is producing its own. Here's what Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said during Atlas's live stream launch. AI is a rare, once in a decade opportunity, to rethink what a browser can be about, how to use one, and how to most productively and pleasantly use the web.

The promise is basically that you won't be scrolling through webpages on your own. You will be accompanied by Chad GPT, and the use cases are apparently limitless. You can ask it to summarize an article, or in ancient mode you can even, even have it add a box of chocolates to your cart. It sounds cool, it sounds cutting edge, and it sounds like it could save you some precious minutes in your day.

A lot of people are, of course, excited by the prospect. A Wall Street journal article, for example, proudly proclaims in its headline that the journalist who tested out a few AI browsers is now a convert. But other corners of the internet have responded to the launch with a resounding, okay? Some less than enthusiastic tech reviewers feel that agent-tip browsers are trying to address problems that no one really has.

And in certain more scathing reviews, users are saying it doesn't seem to be as intuitive. Take this article from Wyard, for instance. Journalist Reese Rogers tested out Atlas in a variety of scenarios. The one that stuck out to me and got an unintended chuckle out of me was when they asked Chad GPD for help deciding which email they should respond to first. Chad GPT's answer? It asked Rogers to prioritize one he had already answered. So it doesn't seem like a lot of consumers are finding enough of a draw to make the switch from a regular browser to an AI-led browser.

Add to that concerns about data privacy and security, and you get a product that makes a lot of promises but doesn't quite meet it. Or as OpenAI employees would say, doesn't seem to quite meet it yet. But it's not just browsers that are seeing this product market mismatch. A couple months ago, OpenAI announced that it was integrating some popular apps into itself. apps like Canva, Spotify, Figma, Booking.com, and more. The promise that AI can design for you, make playlist for you, and make bookings for you all from within the chat GPD platform. It sounds borderline revolutionary.

But if chat GPD was fundamentally changing the way we interact with such tools, shouldn't we have heard about it by now? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Rachel Virgis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nikda Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Friday the 31st of October. So what are these integration supposed to do?

Ideally, it's making it easier for you to do everything within the chat GPD platform itself. Once you type in an ad, you get a list of apps to work with, namely Canva, Spotify, Booking.com, Coursera, Expedia and Figma. Then you can choose an app of your choice and issue commands through chat GPD. You can ask you to design a post on Canva or generate a morning run play. list on Spotify. You could even ask it to help you plan a trip with booking.com. Now I've read the Canva design feature myself. And it's kind of underwhelming at best. Okay, so you can argue that a lackluster prompt would give you a lackluster design. But let's also think about it this way. In the same time you spend engineering or re-engineering a prompt, in case you don't like

the design you get, you could probably find an existing Canva template that needs your exact means. Even if you were to put the design quality aside, let's say you want something that looks halfway decent and not exactly that elaborate, turns out some of the design links chat GPT provides are broken. Some users said that they were taken to error 404 pages when they tried to follow the design links that chat GPT had generated. So it seems like the results of these integrations are mediocre at best and buggy at worst. They're still not a real replacement for human work. And then when you consider the security risks of integrations like this, then it's easy to see why usage isn't really picking up. If you didn't know about the security

concerns, here's a quick overview. For AI browsers especially, your agent AI could run into malicious prompt injection while crawling through the web. Prompt injection is basically when bad faith coding in websites prompts AI agents into doing something it shouldn't, which can range from sharing sensitive information to downloading malware. Now, to be fair, it's not so. something that average consumers need to worry about actively. It's unlikely that you're going to run into these malicious sites if you're sticking to regular corners of the internet. That said, it still doesn't mean you can move through this GPD-Fide ecosystem without caution.

And so, it might be best to leave any sort of financial handling to your human accountant. So if people aren't seeing a massive upside to the way they can operate by using these tools and it doesn't seem like usage is picking up exponentially, at least for now, why is OpenEI pushing these integrations so persistently? More on this in the next segment. Really, no one is doing it like OpenAI. It's everywhere. So the question is, why?

Well, for one, it's trying to be a super app. It's trying to lock you into this ecosystem so that every thought or decision you make, you make it through chat GPT. It doesn't want you to leave for anything. And if that sounds like a difficult feat to manage, especially considering they haven't been having the most successful run so far, it's not exactly that impossible.

There is, in fact, for this. China's VChat is the role model. It's essentially the first ever super app. What started out as a messaging app started integrating social media aspects, think Facebook, and then slowly other mini apps until you could hail a ride, order dinner or pay a friend all through the same app. It's been wildly successful in China and it seems like Open AI is trying to head the same way. In fact, Uber is supposed to be one of the next few apps that will be integrated into chat GPT. But if the adoption seems to be lagging behind, What's the draw here for Open AI?

After all, we know running AI is incredibly expensive. Large AI models like Chad GPT require massive amounts of computing power, electricity and high-end chips, which are already in global short supply. Every response involves thousands of calculations across huge data centers that need to stay cool, fast and secure, which means heavy infrastructure costs. On top of that, the data used to train these models has to be cleaned, be cleaned, labeled, and constantly updated to stay relevant and accurate.

So you can imagine what the costs look like if chat GPT is running in tandem with several different other apps. Open AI isn't exactly profit making yet either. In fact, they're steadily burning cash. You see, at the end of the day, it's a trade-off. To make back what it's burning, it needs to be able to charge users. And for it to confidently charge users, users need to find it indispensable. You know how the chat GPD Go plan was the cheapest in India at 399 and now Indian users can use it for free for a whole year. It's all part of the same plan. Basically, you should not be able to do anything on the internet without it being through chat GPD. The more you depend on it for every banal query or task, the more likely you are to pay for

it when they decide to stop being free. It's all about fueling adoption now to build habits for later. And for their products to become indispensable, to meet the lofty expectations they've set for themselves, these products need to get better. And what do AI products need to get better? Data. So of course, to collect that data, Open AI needs to know everything about you. What you want to know or learn or create, every prompt you enter, every suggestion you reject is exactly what will eventually make chatypd impossible to live without. Essentially, Open AI is playing the long game.

It's betting that as long as it keeps churning out products and integrations, something will eventually stick with its user base. And the faster that happens, the better it works out for the company. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.