OpenAI Now Lets Brands Chat With You Inside ChatGPT Ads

OpenAI is testing a new kind of advertising inside ChatGPT called Sponsored Agents. Instead of seeing a plain ad and clicking away, you can now start a conversation with a brand's own AI assistant right there in the chat. Ask it about a product's size, ingredients, or whether it fits your needs, and it answers with details and links back to the company's website. The feature is live in a limited US test with select advertisers.

Think of it like a store clerk who appears the moment you glance at a product — except this clerk lives inside your chatbot and can talk to you instantly. OpenAI says these agents are separate from ChatGPT itself and separate from whatever conversation led you to the ad. Advertisers can shape and tune the agent using their own websites and materials, so it sounds and behaves the way the brand wants. Notably, the agents cannot take payments, so you can't buy anything directly through them. That keeps the actual checkout on the brand's own site.

OpenAI is also beefing up its ad tools. Advertisers can now create campaigns using plain-English instructions, feed in their own websites and marketing briefs so the AI matches their tone, and let the system rewrite ad text to fit the context of your specific conversation. It can even translate that copy into another language. Alongside this, OpenAI announced its first e-commerce and customer-relationship partnerships with Shopify and HubSpot.

The bigger picture: ads are becoming a real business for OpenAI as it moves toward eventually going public. For you, that means ChatGPT will increasingly mix helpful answers with paid pitches. The honest limitation is trust — a sponsored agent works for the brand, not for you, so its recommendations may be shaped by what sells rather than what's best.