OpenAI is testing an ad format where ChatGPT gets to speak for your company

OpenAI started testing a new advertising format in ChatGPT on 16 September called Sponsored Agents. After clicking an ad, a user can open a clearly labelled conversation with an AI agent that represents the advertiser, ask open questions about the company’s products and services, and follow a link to the website when they are ready. It is a limited test with select advertisers in the United States, and OpenAI has not published pricing.

Put simply, as an advertiser you let ChatGPT represent your company. An AI representative talks to the user on your behalf.

I think this is an extremely interesting use case. It is also, at least to me, a very high-risk advertising format, and the limited alpha makes sense for that reason.

The thing we have learned running ChatGPT ads is that the platform is very much a black box. Context hints are the way you target the ads: you describe the kinds of conversations you want to show up in. But you never get to see which conversations the ads actually showed up in, or in what context. You aim at conversations and get back a click count.

A Sponsored Agent takes that one step further, or several. Now it is not only the placement you cannot see. It is the conversation itself. The agent is talking to your potential customers in your name, and the risk is that it misquotes a price, pulls outdated information, or in some other way damages the reputation of the company, and you find out afterwards, if at all.

For me personally, to feel comfortable using this format at any real scale, I would need very good visibility into what conversations the agent is actually having. Is it representing the company factually? Is it saying things we would say? Until that reporting exists, this is a format to watch closely, not to bet a brand on.

Whether it ever reaches Finland or Europe is another question. It is an alpha in the US market, and it is quite likely we never see it here in this form.

What it does show is that OpenAI is very actively developing novel ways to use the ad platform, beyond the sponsored answer we have today. Ads went live in Europe on 24 August. Less than a month later there is an agent format in test. Whatever lands here next, it presumably will not be a copy of Google or Meta.

Otso Karvinen

Co-founder & Growth Strategist

I help marketing and sales teams do more in a month than their competitors do in a quarter. With 15+ years in marketing and sales, I now help build agentic AI systems that let small teams deliver faster and better results. I’m easy to work with and happy to have a no-strings conversation about where you are and how I and our team at Parvi can help.

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