The corporate GIS vehicle is ESRI's ArcGIS Pro. When digitizing new features which are to be used in GPlates, each feature is required to have a UUID-based FEATURE_ID in the form of GPlates-7344d973-6ff1-47f7-93b9-bdb9cf7197ee. In ArcGIS Pro, this can be done easily using the field calculator. The following definition (based on ESRI's website) can be plonked into the Code Block part of the Field Calculator:
def ID(): import uuid return 'GPlates-' + str(uuid.uuid4())
while in the field assignment (FEATURE_ID =) one then simply uses the above definition, assigning FIELD_ID = ID()