OpenAI is introducing advertising on ChatGPT, in a much-anticipated move that opens up a lucrative new revenue stream for the company. OpenAI will begin testing personalized adverts within its free chatbot product and ChatGPT Go — its lowest-cost chat subscription — in the US in the coming weeks, the company announced in a blog post on Friday.
The AI giant will begin by testing adverts at the bottom of ChatGPT answers within user conversations in the coming weeks. These ads will be personalized according to the content of users’ current conversations, and “clearly labelled and separated from the organic answer”, OpenAI said in the blog post. During the test, ChatGPT users will be able to turn off such personalization, as well as clearing the data used for ads at any time, the company said. Users can also opt to go ad-free via a paid subscription tier.
It’s a much-anticipated move from OpenAI, which restructured from a not-for-profit to a for-profit company last October. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has always been openly wary of balancing advertising with preserving consumer trust, and had promised that when the company did introduce ads, it would take a “thoughtful and tasteful” approach. OpenAI’s announcement of ChatGPT advertising comes just five days after major rival Google announced its own advertising pilot, focusing on direct offers that brands could offer customers that are preparing to purchase items within its AI chat.
“People trust ChatGPT for many important and personal tasks, so as we introduce ads, it’s crucial we preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place,” OpenAI said in the blog post. “That means you need to trust that ChatGPT’s responses are driven by what’s objectively useful, never by advertising.”
Why it matters for brands
In the space of a week, fashion’s advertising playbook has been turned on its head. AI chatbots have become a new commerce interface, not just an answer engine, where the shopping journey, from research to purchase, is being streamlined into a single AI conversation. This week’s news shows that the tech companies behind these chatbots are intent on creating a new advertising paradigm that prioritizes interactive and intent-driven adverts over static, more universal ads.
Experts say that brands can best prepare by adopting early AIO practices, structuring their product data and website content so that it’s more likely the AI models behind these chatbots surface their product organically. Through integrations with OpenAI and Google AI, the e-commerce platform Shopify is giving brands with sites built on its infrastructure a plug-and-play way to experiment with this new model.
But these new advertising pilots are testing the water when it comes to what the consumer responds to. Given that so many AI chatbot users turn to these conversations for their perceived “unbiased” results, these new advertising models could be completely at odds with what consumers turning to ChatGPT and Google AI want from their so-called AI personal shopper.
In this early testing period, that could be a boon for smaller fashion brands without huge marketing spend, as the AI models behind these chatbots do still prioritise organic content that lives on the web for their in-chat results. In-chat adverts will be clearly labelled thus, and we don’t yet know whether this will put consumers off clicking the ads at all. So while the tech companies behind AI chatbots may be racing to unlock new advertising revenue through piloting their own pay-to-play schemes, brand experts say that merit-based brand equity and a laser focus on brand values are the two important, certain, factors that still matter most to brands.