OpenAI is preparing to introduce advertising to its ChatGPT platform in the coming months, a move the company says is designed to help expand access to its AI tools at scale.
The implications for the advertising industry could be significant. As AI platforms become increasingly embedded in everyday digital behaviour, the arrival of ads inside conversational interfaces represents a potential new frontier for brands — and a major shift in how audiences encounter commercial messaging.
But with that opportunity come questions. How will ads coexist with trusted AI responses? What guardrails will be needed to protect users? And can advertising enhance, rather than disrupt, the experience?
To explore what ads on AI platforms could mean in practice, we asked experts from across advertising and marketing for their views on the opportunities, risks and realities ahead.
Barney Worfolk-Smith, Chief Growth Officer, DAIVID
“This depends on OpenAI getting over its MANY existential threats. Legal, cash burn, ‘good enough’ competition and reliance on other tech. If it does survive and thrive then it’s potentially a major disruption.
“First, to Google. CPCs are sky high and in the short term, I could see a whole load of people jumping on a chance to try ChatGPT’s text and card ads. Google’s daily visits are still 15x higher than ChatGPT to contextualise that.
“More broadly, AI optimisation vs SEO is going to be a BIG deal. Discovery will still stay in social, but consideration in AI responses will manifest as instant conversational commerce.
“In this post-click world brands are going to need to have clear DNA, creativity and emotional resonance to avoid becoming a homogenised footnote in AI response.”
Michelle Scholz, Managing Director, Jung von Matt TECH
“AI platforms aren’t another channel – they’re a new interface, requiring a new way of working. This will fundamentally change tech, creation and media.
“A fundamental shift in relevance: Ads in AI move media from reach to relevance. Brands without strong data and tech foundations risk becoming invisible.
“Trust is the underestimated currency: The success of AI ads will depend on trust. Poor transparency could damage brands faster than any performance gain.
“Rethinking adtech: AI ads challenge classic adtech. It’s no longer about targeting users, but about earning relevance within answers.
“AI-Readiness of adtech: Most adtech isn’t built for AI environments. Contextual relevance will matter more than programmatic scale.
“A value test: AI turns media into a value test. If your brand doesn’t improve the answer, it won’t show up.
“In summary, with platforms like ChatGPT becoming a primary interface for information and decision-making, advertising shifts from buying attention to earning a place in the answer. Relevance, trust, and genuine value creation become the currency – shaping how brands and adtech succeed in an AI-driven world.”
Mattia Fosci, CEO, Anonymised
“OpenAI’s move to enable advertising on its flagship product was inevitable given the company’s urgent need to reduce its burn rate.
“ChatGPT ads will compete directly with search, which is good news for advertisers, but I don’t expect a huge impact on budget allocations in the short term.
“In order for its ads business to make a significant impact on the top line, OpenAI will need to work on in its ad tech stack (especially measurement), e-commerce partnerships and advertiser relations.
“Even if they are an exceptional company by any measure, this will take time. How many years did Amazon need to scale its ads revenue?”
Andrew Miller, EVP, Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
“The introduction of ads inside AI platforms like ChatGPT represents a major shift that will reshape how healthcare brands interact with their audiences.
“As OpenAI tests ad placements within ChatGPT’s free and Go tiers, marketers gain access to high intent, problem‑solving moments that traditional search and social channels can’t fully mirror.
“A strong GEO strategy supported by LLM optimisation will help brands secure citations within the same AI‑generated responses people rely on to learn and make decisions.
“These experiences will also shape how they interact with these AI platforms giving valuable signals to brands and marketers. In healthcare, where trust, accuracy, and compliance are essential, this evolution brings both opportunity and complexity.
“AI ad formats may allow brands to offer more relevant, personalised solutions, but they also require new safeguards, creative standards, and governance to meet strict health regulations.
“And while AI platforms aim to deliver a more organic ad experience, new approaches to measurement and transparency are still needed before these environments become proven conversion drivers.
“Early formats have focused on eCommerce, but expansion into additional verticals is expected, and unlike Google and Microsoft, ChatGPT plans to offer more transparent, AI‑specific performance metrics.
“Ultimately, the challenge ahead is balancing reliable, trustworthy user experiences with the insight and data brands need to build smarter strategies.”
James Taylor, CEO and Founder, Particular Audience
“The arrival of ads in ChatGPT could be a hugely significant moment. Initially, the ads won’t be ‘functional’ beyond chat formats, but as they evolve, enabled by MCP (Model Context Protocol), everything changes.
“OpenAI adopted MCP as the standard for building integrations (now called apps) for ChatGPT. Apps, however, have had a distribution problem, because up until now, filtering all apps (functions) based on contextual utility (your chat) in real time hasn’t been economically viable at scale.
“But advertising introduces funding that makes selective, intent-driven invocation of functionality viable.
“And if functionality can be invoked inside an ad or brand chat, ads stop being messages and become interfaces, meaning that sales inventory becomes callable; pricing becomes queryable; availability becomes real-time; checkout becomes a function, not a redirect; order status becomes checkable; support becomes accessible; and even negotiation becomes feasible.
“It’s where commerce and advertising finally collapse into a single system, and it moves the conversation from: ‘Here’s some information’ to: ‘Here’s the outcome you were already trying to achieve.’
“Exciting times.”
Dom Blacklock, VP, International Digital Media, Active International UK
“The increasing everyday use of generative AI tools is now permanent and is driving the biggest shift on the internet since Google launched, with generative engines becoming the new “front door” to information.
“This change challenges the long-standing power on paid search and search engine optimisation (SEO), as discoverability moves away from rankings and towards visibility within AI chatbots and tools.
“Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is emerging as the successor to SEO, focused on trust, corroboration, and visibility within AI models rather than traditional search results optimisation.
“As brands and advertisers navigate this shift, measurement challenges and questions of trust, their paid search and SEO strategies will need to be fundamentally reworked.
“In this environment, Corporate Trade (media barter) offer proven ways to maximise marketing ROI and reduce risk, and Active International is investing in AI, data and digital expertise to help clients stay visible and competitive during this transition.
Mike Fantis, Vice President, Managing Partner, DAC
“Ads will be triggered by the content of the conversation and the types of questions being asked. How successful they are will be defined by how effectively the AI is able to interpret intent, and whether the ads are actually served at the right moment in the user’s journey.
“Advertisers are likely to see impressions and CTR, but what’s less clear is whether there will be visibility into the specific queries or conversation types driving them.
“ChatGPT says ads will only appear when relevant. If that holds true, the channel it competes with most directly is display.
“If ads are delivered in a more contained environment, matched to intent rather than broad content signals, and genuinely add value within the conversation, then this could significantly reduce wastage, at least in theory.
“This is an issue that programmatic display has struggled with for some time. However, the advantages will have to be weighed up with costs, and we can’t compare those yet.
“Given the scale of usage and the investment required to keep these systems running and improving, the introduction of ads was always inevitable, but not concerning. It’s healthy for Google to face real competition”.
Simon Shaw, CEO and Founder Fifty
“The integration of ads into AI platforms like ChatGPT isn’t a surprising development – ad-supported models always follow eyeballs, and it’s clear that advertising will be necessary to underpin AI platforms commercially.
“However, this shift introduces critical challenges, particularly around consumer trust and user experience. It’s imperative that these ad models, including the potential for more conversationally native ad units, be introduced in a way that is completely transparent to the user, while also offering commercial value and unique engagement opportunities for advertisers.
“Failure to do so risks eroding trust on both sides, and diminishing the competitive advantage of first-movers like OpenAI.
“AI presents a huge opportunity for marketing to be more effective. Already small and mid-sized brands are able to run much fuller marketing funnels, using the speed and efficiency of AI to power better outcomes.
“Advertisers should continue to identify the right strategic partners to test and learn in these environments as they mature, and evolving their tech stacks now to ensure they are ready to capitalise as these models scale.”
Sammy Mansourpour, Managing Director, Agency UK
“ChatGPT results and all the mainstream LLM models are based on search data inputs, so it is difficult to see how advertising – ChatGPT in this case – and SEO can be split. The present reality is that any robust search content strategy is informing ChatGPT results.
“Our approach would likely be to co-ordinate paid advertising on ChatGPT in much the same way as we do with paid search and SEO on Google; but with one key difference – because whether paid placements across ChatGPT resemble traditional advertising in its overtness and signposting is yet to be seen.
“By definition, the longer narrative and results-driven dialogue of any LLM will need to sit comfortably alongside paid placements. But maybe that’s just the evolution of press advertising?”
Jess Redman, Content Strategist, Cogworks
“There’s a real UX consideration here. People value AI because it feels clean, focused, and distraction-free. When commercial messages interrupt the flow of a conversation for some users, this can be off-putting.
“Remember when X introduced paid placements? They lost a chunk of their audience. Although X is still one of the leading platforms globally, introducing monetisation and ads changed its culture from a real-time discussion board to users gamifying the system for their commercial intent.
“The same cultural transformation could happen with ads in platforms like Chat GPT, leading to the rise of competitive AI models that base their culture around ad-free content. (We see this kind of competitive model in platforms like BlueSky as an alternative to X).
“On the other hand, I don’t think ads in AI are all bad; as long as the Ads themselves are high-quality, relevant, and genuinely helpful (and might I add, clearly marked as sponsored), they can add value to the experience rather than detract from it”