OpenAI Is Turning ChatGPT Ads Into Conversations

At a Glance

• OpenAI is testing Sponsored Agents that let users converse with brands after clicking ChatGPT ads.

• Advertisers can create, update, and analyze campaigns using natural-language prompts.

• AI can generate suggested ad copy and imagery from landing pages and campaign objectives.

• Advertisers can adapt messaging to conversations and automatically translate it into preferred languages.

• HubSpot and Shopify are integrating ChatGPT Ads into existing marketing and commerce workflows.

• The changes point toward advertising built around AI conversations rather than traditional display formats.

Advertising has spent decades trying to capture attention in increasingly crowded environments. OpenAI is now experimenting with something fundamentally different: what happens after someone sees the ad. On September 16, the company announced a series of new AI-powered advertising tools for ChatGPT, including Sponsored Agents that allow people to have a conversation with a business after clicking an advertisement. At the same time, OpenAI is giving advertisers new ways to create, manage, and analyze campaigns using natural-language prompts, while adding AI-generated creative assistance and integrations with HubSpot and Shopify.

The distinction is important. This is not simply another advertising format squeezed into an AI interface. OpenAI is building advertising around the conversational behavior that makes ChatGPT different from a conventional search engine or social platform. Instead of clicking an ad, leaving the platform and navigating a product page alone, a user can potentially ask questions first. For marketers, that creates a new space between the advertisement and the eventual purchase decision, where an AI system can help explain a product or service.

OpenAI's most noticeable new feature is Sponsored Agents, currently being tested with select advertisers in the United States. After seeing a relevant ChatGPT advertisement, a user can choose to begin a clearly labeled conversation with an AI agent sponsored by the business. The user can ask questions, explain what matters to them and, when ready, follow a link to the advertiser's website.

OpenAI uses a relatively ordinary shopping example to illustrate the concept. Someone might see an advertisement for a dining table but still want to know whether it will fit in a particular room, how many people it seats, or how to care for the finish. Those questions traditionally belong to a salesperson, customer-service representative, or product page. A Sponsored Agent creates another possibility: the advertisement becomes the entry point to an interactive product conversation.

There is also an important separation between the sponsored experience and ChatGPT itself. OpenAI says conversations with Sponsored Agents are distinct from ChatGPT's independent answers and separate from the original conversation a user started in ChatGPT. That distinction matters because the sponsored agent represents the advertiser, while ChatGPT's independent responses are not supposed to become an extension of that commercial conversation.

OpenAI is also changing the advertiser's side of the equation. Rather than requiring marketers to work exclusively through conventional campaign interfaces, the company says advertisers can use natural-language prompts in ChatGPT with its Ads Manager plugin to create, update, and analyze campaigns. A website or advertising brief can become the starting point for a campaign, while performance data can be used to generate recommendations about what to do next.

That moves AI beyond writing individual pieces of marketing copy. The system is being positioned as an interface for campaign operations. A marketer could describe what they want, provide the underlying business information, and use conversational instructions to work through parts of the advertising process. OpenAI's broader direction is to make the mechanics of advertising less dependent on navigating a series of specialized tools and more dependent on describing the desired outcome.

For businesses, the implications could be significant, particularly for smaller marketing teams. Campaign creation traditionally involves research, copywriting, creative production, translation, targeting, setup, measurement, and optimization. OpenAI is attempting to bring more of those activities into an AI-assisted workflow. The company still places the advertiser in control of the resulting campaign, however, with generated creative presented for review and editing before it is used.

OpenAI is also adding AI assistance directly inside Ads Manager. When an advertiser drafts an advertisement, the system can suggest copy and imagery based on the advertiser's landing page and campaign objective. The advertiser can then review and edit those suggestions before deciding whether to add them to a campaign.

That is a notable evolution from the way generative AI has typically entered marketing departments. Initially, AI was often treated as a tool for producing isolated assets: a headline, product description, social post, or image. OpenAI's new approach connects those creative suggestions to the advertiser's existing landing page and stated campaign objective, giving the AI more context about what the advertisement is supposed to accomplish.

The company is also introducing optional AI-powered text customization. When enabled, it can adapt existing headlines and descriptions to better fit the context of a conversation and automatically translate advertising copy into a user's preferred language. For marketers operating across multiple markets, that potentially turns localization into something more dynamic than simply producing a fixed collection of translated advertisements.

OpenAI is not asking every advertiser to abandon the systems they already use. The company announced integrations with HubSpot, its first CRM partner, and Shopify, its first e-commerce partner. The idea is to bring ChatGPT advertising into established customer and commerce workflows rather than requiring businesses to construct an entirely separate technology stack.

Businesses using HubSpot can connect a ChatGPT Ads account, create advertisements, track performance, and follow up on leads directly within HubSpot using information from their HubSpot environment, for a CRM platform that creates a connection between advertising activity and the customer information already used by a business's marketing and sales teams.

Shopify's integration takes a similar approach for ecommerce. U.S.-based Shopify merchants can use the ChatGPT Ads app in the Shopify App Store to integrate product catalogs and measurement tools, create campaigns and track performance. OpenAI says the app is scheduled to become available internationally in markets where ChatGPT Ads are available beginning September 23.

The larger story is not simply that ChatGPT is adding more sophisticated advertisements. It is that OpenAI is experimenting with an advertising model designed around how people increasingly use AI to discover products, compare alternatives, and make decisions.

Traditional digital advertising generally separates discovery from research. An advertisement gets attention, a click sends someone to another destination, and the business then tries to convert that visitor. Search engines, ecommerce sites, social networks and advertisers have spent years optimizing every step between those stages. Conversational AI potentially collapses some of those steps because the same environment can introduce an idea, answer questions, and help a person decide what information they need next.

Sponsored Agents put a commercial version of that interaction directly behind an advertisement. Ads Manager puts AI on the other side of the equation, helping businesses create and manage those campaigns. HubSpot and Shopify then connect the advertising activity to systems businesses already depend on. Taken together, the pieces represent OpenAI's attempt to build an advertising platform in which AI is not simply the technology generating an ad, but the environment surrounding the entire interaction.

For consumers, the experience will ultimately depend on how useful and clearly separated these sponsored conversations remain from independent AI assistance. For advertisers, it introduces another question: if customers can ask an advertisement questions before visiting a website, what does an advertisement need to accomplish? The traditional goal of winning the click may gradually become only the beginning of the interaction.

OpenAI describes these launches as another step toward an AI-centered advertising platform. Sponsored Agents are still being tested with select U.S. advertisers, while the new campaign and creative tools and the HubSpot and Shopify integrations expand the infrastructure around ChatGPT Ads. The technology is arriving at a moment when advertising, search, customer service, and commerce are increasingly overlapping inside conversational interfaces.

The banner ad is not disappearing. But OpenAI is testing what happens when the ad can talk back.