Ads coming to ChatGPT: Industry experts comment

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.

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.”