OpenAI is Opening the Window on Its Ad Ambitions
The company's latest launches—and my interview with its monetization leaders—show how aggressively it's building an ad platform.
The AI monetization push keeps getting stronger at OpenAI. This week, I’m exploring what its latest announcements mean for advertisers.
First, two announcements:
Possible Miami may have just ended, but Cannes Lions is right around the corner. Want to join my growing list of partners for presentations, panels and yacht events? I have a few more openings in my schedule. Reach out if you’d like to work with me!
Next week I’ll be in New York for two exciting events. First, Skai’s ShopAble conference on May 13th, where I’m presenting “AI, Consumers and Commerce: A Reality Check.” Then on May 14th, I’m keynoting Operative’s Inview 2026: The Media Intelligence Summit. Will you be at these events? Let me know so we can say hi.
Ok, let’s dive into the main story.
THE MAIN STORY
OpenAI is Opening the Window on Its Ad Ambitions
OpenAI made several major moves in its ad business this week. In an interview with The AI Ad Economy, the company’s ad leaders revealed important details about new ad formats, why ChatGPT ads behave differently than search ads, and why OpenAI is keeping tight control over decisioning.
Here’s what OpenAI announced:
Ads manager: Now beta testing in the US, the ads manager will allow advertisers to create accounts, set budgets/bids, upload ads, launch and manage campaigns and view ad performance details.
CPC bidding, conversions API and pixel-based measurement: These features bring OpenAI closer to the standard buying and measurement capabilities that other digital ad companies already offer.
Adtech and agency partners: Previously announced adtech partner Criteo has been joined by Kargo, Pacvue and StackAdapt on the ad buying side and Adobe on the ad creative side. Holding companies Dentsu, WPP, Publicis and Omnicom join as agency partners.
What it means for advertisers, OpenAI and digital media
For advertisers: It’s now much easier to start advertising on ChatGPT, and to compare results across platforms. Pacvue clients, for example, can “manage ChatGPT campaigns alongside Amazon, Walmart and 100+ channels in one place,” president Melissa Burdick wrote on LinkedIn. And the introduction of CPC pricing means advertisers will be able to use a buying method they’ve long been familiar with, lowering the psychological barrier for performance marketers to start testing ChatGPT ads.
For OpenAI: These steps show how urgent it is for OpenAI to demonstrate that advertising can become a significant revenue stream. Remember, this is a company that has set a $100 billion revenue goal by 2030. By adding things like an ads manager, CPC bidding, pixel measurement and CAPI, OpenAI is demonstrating that it understands the basic building blocks that are necessary for advertisers to feel comfortable testing on ChatGPT. The list of partners is also a strong signal. It doesn’t guarantee OpenAI will automatically get a big chunk of advertiser budgets, but it gives the company a wide-open window of opportunity.
For digital media: OpenAI is no longer behaving like a company cautiously experimenting with ads. It’s building the infrastructure for an entire advertising system extremely quickly. That’s something that every digital media player needs to watch closely.
My Conversation with OpenAI’s Ad Leaders
I spoke to Asad Awan, head of monetization, and Benji Shomair, VP of monetization, this week. Both used to work at Meta, and the conversation offers a revealing look at how OpenAI views the ad market and where it sees meaningful differences between conversational ads and search ads. (Interview is lightly edited for clarity.)
Debra Aho Williamson: In the first part of your test, the ads were largely search ads that advertisers were importing into ChatGPT. Is there anything new coming up about the types of ads that people can run?
Asad Awan: Right now we still have the same format, which is the business name and a few lines of title and subtitle with a small image. But of course, we are iterating on different formats. We don’t have a date around when we will launch some of those, but it’s certainly something which is top of mind.
Benji Shomair: One comment on the idea that this was all just search: I think what we found as we’ve been progressing through pilot is that the folks who are just taking their search ads and pouring them directly onto our platform are not the ones who are performing the best. What we’re finding is that this isn’t the same as search for a host of different reasons. How people are using the platform is different and therefore the ads are different. And then also the way the ranking engine works, because of the contextual targeting. On our platform, we’re finding that one of the things that really helps an advertiser perform well is using a lot of creative variation.
Debra: Tell me more about how you’re working with the adtech partners in the announcement.
Benji: Criteo is the only one that has been out there officially, and they were the first of our technology partners. We work with Kargo, StackAdapt and Pacvue in the same way as Criteo: Access to the same API, providing budgets, bids, creative and bringing advertising onto our platform. Adobe is slightly different; Adobe is a creative partner. A lot of advertisers use Adobe to manage their creative assets across different channels, and now ChatGPT is an additional channel where they can do that in the same place.
The role the partners play is bringing budgets, bids and creative. There’s no decisioning taking place. All the ad delivery decisions take place within the ChatGPT system. A partner like StackAdapt will work differently with other platforms, and they’ll do real-time bidding, but we don’t have real-time bidding on our platform. They’re bringing the budgets and we control the decisioning.
Debra: Why is it important for OpenAI to retain control of decisioning? Is it because you’re still building this out, or is control of decisioning something you want to maintain going forward?
Asad: The main question in decisioning is that when an ad comes in, you have a conversation from the user and you need to make sure you match these ads in a relevant way, because we don’t share that conversation [with the advertiser]. We believe that this matching will evolve as the platform evolves and as the formats become more native. All the way from matching the ad, the ranking, the relevance—all of that is an insight. And a big part of that is driven by [the fact that] how people use this platform is different, and we want to make these [ads] very native, both from an experience perspective and from a ranking perspective, and how they fit in the user journey through these conversations.
Debra: Digiday reported that you are getting ready to expand ads into Europe. Can you comment on that?
Benji: We plan on expanding more broadly to other markets. We’re not commenting on specific countries just yet. What Digiday was pointing towards is actually a pretty standard thing that was happening in the app, and it may or may not point toward going to Europe in the short term. [UPDATE ON 5/7: OpenAI announced that ads will soon expand to United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea.]
Debra: It’s been reported that retail advertisers are heavy users of ChatGPT ads, and travel as well. Is there any change in the categories of advertisers that you’re seeing hopping onto ChatGPT?
Asad: No, I think those verticals—travel, retail, ecomm, SaaS—are doing quite well and the demand has been pretty strong.
Debra: One of my main theses about AI media is that this is moving much faster than people are expecting. What are you seeing in terms of advertisers and their ability to keep up? Do they need a lot of handholding or are they ready to jump in?
Benji: There’s the excitement that you only see a platform of this scale arrive every decade or so, and curiosity to figure out what works on that new platform. Folks are leaning in pretty aggressively in terms of iterating and working with us as we identify things that are working and then shifting their strategy.
Takeaways
OpenAI is moving beyond experimentation. It’s rapidly assembling the components of a full advertising system and preparing for scale. Advertisers don’t need to shift major budgets overnight, but they do need to start building institutional knowledge about how advertising in conversational settings performs differently than other forms of advertising.
Here’s what others are saying about OpenAI’s announcements:
OpenAI Applications CTO Vijaye Raji calls out the engineering team (and lots of AI tokens) for the speed of the ad features launch. Plus: monetization jobs at OpenAI.
Digiday’s Krystal Scanlon digs deeper into OpenAI’s rationale for controlling decisioning.
Retail media guru Roger Dunn explains why the list of OpenAI’s new partners is actually “the bigger story.”
THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE AI AD ECONOMY
Regular AI Usage is On the Rise
The percentage of US adults using generative AI chatbots is still increasing, though more slowly than last year, according to Ipsos. Its most recent Consumer Tracker study, conducted in April 2026, found that 59% of US adults who were familiar with the concept of artificial intelligence use a chatbot “often” or “sometimes.” While that’s up 15 points from March 2025, it’s only a 3-point difference from November 2025.
However, the percentage using chatbots “often” is widening, standing at 24% in April. double where it was last March.
HEADLINES
Signals from The AI Ad Economy
AI Advertising Signals
OpenAI is Now Sharing Its Users’ Data With Advertisers (Adweek) — OpenAI’s privacy update formalizes purchase-data sharing and marketing-partner relationships. The structural shift is clear: measurement and targeting are becoming part of ChatGPT’s ad platform foundation.
Google updates links within AI Overviews, AI Mode (Search Engine Land) — Google is making publisher, Reddit and expert-source links more prominent inside AI answers. AI search is evolving from a closed-answer interface into a blended discovery layer that may better preserve outbound exploration and content visibility.
AI Commerce & Agentic Signals
Stripe updates Link, a digital wallet that autonomous AI agents can use, too (TechCrunch) — Stripe is giving agents controlled payment access through Link instead of raw credentials. Agentic commerce is shifting from checkout experimentation to delegated-payment infrastructure.
Meta readies AI shopping agents for Instagram to rival TikTok Shop (EMARKETER) — Meta is developing Instagram shopping agents that could identify products in feeds and complete purchases. Social commerce is moving toward AI-mediated product recognition and transaction routing.
Data Signals
Reddit expects revenue above estimates as AI tools fuel ad growth (Reuters) — Reddit’s active advertiser count rose 75%, Q1 revenue grew 69% and performance ads now exceed 60% of ad revenue. AI-assisted ad tools are strengthening Reddit’s performance-marketplace position.
Shopify expects agentic commerce to lift ecommerce adoption (EMARKETER) — Shopify says AI-driven traffic rose 8x and AI-search orders grew 13x in Q1. AI discovery is beginning to produce measurable merchant demand, not just exploratory traffic.
WHAT’S DEBBIE UP TO?
Quoted
Yahoo says its AI assistant has a secret weapon in the new search wars (Lara O’Reilly, Business Insider)
OpenAI opens up ChatGPT ads manager to the U.S. while promising third-party measurement, CPA bidding (Krystal Scanlon, Digiday)
Podcasts
“AI is the New Ad Space” with AdExchanger: In a conversation with Allison Schiff, we explore why AI media can be powerful in the middle of the funnel, what organizational changes brands should make to be AI-ready and what needs to happen to make OpenAI’s $100 billion ad forecast feasible. Plus, my foodie recommendation for the restaurant you need to go to after visiting the Pike Place Market in my city, Seattle.
The AI Edge with U of Digital. It’s been a while since I did a purely news-driven podcast and this one was rapid-fire fun. U of Digital’s Shiv Gupta and Myles Younger and I debated whether Sam Altman is a liar, why Anthropic’s Mythos announcement might have been a marketing tactic, whether AEO/GEO has jumped the shark, and the two big developments in consumer behavior and advertising that will tell me if we’ve gotten to a social media-like turning point in AI. Catch it on YouTube, Apple podcasts or Spotify.
Retailgentic: I joined ReFiBuy’s Scot Wingo for a wide-ranging discussion about how AI is reshaping advertising and commerce and what brands should be doing now. Watch the full podcast here!
Research
IAB + Sonata Insights: The AI Ad Gap Widens (read our 2024 study here)
Mediaocean: 2026 Advertising Outlook Report (I wrote the foreword)
On Stage
Skai’s ShopAble, May 13, 2026, New York City. I’ll be presenting “AI, Consumers & Commerce: A Reality Check.” RSVP at my personal link here.
Operative’s Inview 2026: The Media Intelligence Summit, May 14, 2026, New York City. I’m giving the opening keynote, “The AI Monetization Shift: Why Media Won’t Get 8 Years This Time.” Request an invitation to attend here.
AdExchanger’s Programmatic AI, May 19, 2026, Las Vegas. I’m delivering the opening keynote “Consumers Aren’t Where Ads Expect Them Anymore.” Use my code JOINME20 for 20% off your pass.
Path to Purchase Institute’s Retail Media Summit, June 3, 2026, Chicago. I’m delivering “Who Owns the Customer in the Age of AI-Fueled Commerce?”. Check out the agenda and register here.
Debra Aho Williamson is the Founder and Chief Analyst of Sonata Insights, where she helps advertisers navigate the next major structural shift in media: the rapid rise and monetization of AI platforms. Over nearly two decades as an analyst at EMARKETER, Debra was among the first to forecast the growth of social media advertising and identify how it would fundamentally reshape marketing investment.
Today, she applies that same pattern-recognition lens to AI, analyzing how consumer adoption is accelerating monetization and redefining brand budgets, media strategy and industry power dynamics. Through Sonata Insights, she partners with leading platforms, agencies and technology companies to deliver research, advisory and strategic narratives that bring clarity and credibility to this transition.