Here’s the new thing: an ad in ChatGPT that you can talk to. OpenAI said Wednesday it’s testing what it calls Sponsored Agents. You see an ad, you click it, and you get a separate chat with an agent the business pays for. You can say what matters to you, ask follow-up questions, and follow a link to the business’s site when you’re ready. OpenAI’s own example is a dining table: does it fit my room, how many does it seat, how do I look after the finish.
The part we’d read twice is the wall between that chat and the rest of ChatGPT. The sponsored conversation is “clearly labeled,” OpenAI says, and it’s “distinct from ChatGPT’s independent answers,” kept apart from the conversation you were having, and one you choose to open. That’s OpenAI’s description, not ours; we haven’t sat in one yet. It’s a test, with select advertisers in the United States, and the page doesn’t say when or whether it widens.
The rest of the announcement is for the people who buy the ads. Advertisers can now build, change and read campaigns by typing prompts in ChatGPT, turn a website or a brief into a campaign, and get suggested copy and images drawn from their own landing page. There’s an opt-in that rewrites a headline to fit the conversation it lands in and translates it into the reader’s language. And ChatGPT ads now sit inside two tools you may already run the business on. In HubSpot, anyone who keeps customers there can connect an ads account, create ads and follow up on leads without leaving it. On Shopify, a US merchant can install a ChatGPT Ads app from the app store and run campaigns off the product catalog it already has. The Shopify app goes international on September 23.
What we couldn’t find out: what a sponsored agent costs, who’s in the test, and what the agent is allowed to say about a competitor. We haven’t asked OpenAI, and we haven’t found a valley business in the test.