To Sell Electricity, You Also Have to Sell Lamps: AI's Seven Entry Points — Which Layer Should Service Providers Bet On?

The vendors go end-to-end at every layer

Looking back at these seven entry points, the vendors have gotten a foothold in almost every layer: at the service layer there's MCP and Managed Agents; for personal computers and always-on cloud agents, they're entering the fight themselves; for IM there's Claude Tag; for browsers there's the ChatGPT desktop app. They're not just defending their own chat box — the entire ecosystem wants a piece of the action.

Why the urgency? Perhaps they've judged that Agentic OS will eventually mature, and if they don't lock in users now, there won't be a chance later. And of course, you don't put all your eggs in one basket.

OpenAI is the most ambitious. On the left, it's fighting Chrome: the desktop app has a built-in browser with WebMCP, and in August it even hosted a WebMCP hackathon with Google Chrome, Cloudflare, and Shopify. On the right, it's kicking at Apple: it acquired Jony Ive's io to build hardware, with the first product expected to ship no earlier than February 2027.

On format, though, they're being quite pragmatic. GPTs will be retired on December 11, replaced by skills plus MCP-based plugins, and the ChatGPT desktop app even reads Claude's plugin marketplace format directly. MCP was originally pushed by Anthropic, and the two sides are increasingly converging. This is good news for service providers: build one set of tools and it works on both.

Open source demonstrates first, the big players follow

This wave of change in entry points has been driven in large part by the open source community. In 2023, AutoGPT let everyone see for the first time what an agent loop actually looks like. When the lobster went viral at the end of 2025, people realized what they actually wanted was an assistant that lived in IM, had memory, and could keep running continuously — sparking a craze of people scrambling to buy mac minis.

Then the big players caught up. When Cowork launched in January, the lobster was just about to go viral; the updates over the following months were almost all filling in the gameplay that lobster users had already gotten used to: scheduled tasks were added in February, and Dispatch, which lets you delegate tasks remotely from your phone, launched in March. Desktop agents from various companies came out one after another as well. As for the always-on cloud agent wave, that's been more a case of the big players chasing each other.

By the time of the proactive agent wave, the big players had essentially filled in the last scenario that the lobster had already demonstrated: the computer closed, the assistant still running continuously in the cloud. The lobster can be considered to have accomplished its mission and stepped aside.

Open source may not always win the entry point, but it's responsible for showing everyone what the demand looks like, forcing the vendors to send power further out.

The outlet has been officially standardized, but the specs still aren't unified

Back to the third path mentioned earlier: borrowing the electricity already at the user's home. At the end of September, OpenAI's DevDay introduced "Sign in with ChatGPT," which effectively formalizes this path. Users log into third-party apps with their ChatGPT account, and their subscription usage can carry over, without needing an API key. You can even set a weekly limit for each app — once it hits the cap, it stops, instead of quietly switching over to billing on the app's side.

This design is almost exactly the kind of revenue split we had in mind as ideal. That said, it's still in preview: open source tools and personal projects running locally can already use it directly (since you could already farm usage through the Codex app server anyway), but paid apps, or services running on remote servers, still need to apply separately. The outlet exists, but it hasn't been opened up to everyone yet.

Another reality is that the vendors don't have a consistent stance yet on "whether a subscription can be carried over to third parties" — some allow it, some restrict it, and some don't have a channel for it at all. Each has its own reasoning. Opening it up can grow the ecosystem, and incidentally plants your flag at the front door of someone else's app; restricting it also makes sense, since subscription pricing is essentially a subsidy war, and once agents start running, the costs are on a completely different scale.

Using the history of electrical power as an analogy, this is a bit like the era when AC and DC power were still fighting it out: the electricity exists, but which plug fits depends on which power company you're connected to. Honestly, right now there really are just two plug types on the market: the OpenAI-compatible format and the Claude format, with almost every other model choosing one side or building compatibility with both — exactly like the AC/DC rivalry.