OpenAI’s flurry of moves—Sora 2, Media Manager, a browser, a Jony Ive device push, compute deals, and the ROI acqui-hire—looks scattered on the surface but points to a shift away from a commoditizing chat layer toward harder-to-copy ground: rights, runtime, distribution, and personalization. The catch: rivals like xAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are ahead on distribution, so leaders should treat chat apps as swappable, build agentic workflows around their own data, and own the channels where customers already are.
