OpenAI Touts Progress in 19-Week-Old Ad Business

OpenAI is promoting progress in what it expects to become a $100 billion ad business.

The artificial intelligence (AI) startup is making its inaugural appearance at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week. As Ad Exchanger reported Tuesday (June 23), the company is using the event to showcase what Dave Dugan, OpenAI’s head of global ads solutions, described as “an entirely new ads product [and] an entirely new experience.”

“Why does someone open the ChatGPT app?” Dugan asked reporters. “They want to do research, they want to solve a problem, they want to get information on a particular topic. They’re not coming to ChatGPT to scroll.”

The report noted Dugan’s career as an executive at Meta, which took 17 years to surpass $100 billion in ad revenue, while OpenAI has reportedly told investors it will reach that goal within the next four years.

However, the company stressed that its ad business is still just getting started, having just launched 19 weeks ago, Ad Exchanger added.

“It’s like a baby; for a while, you talk about how old your baby is in weeks,” said Dugan.

Still, the report noted, things are progressing quickly. Since February, the company has introduced its ads pilot in the U.S., debuted an ad manager in beta and added international markets, such as the U.K. and Australia.

In addition, the report said, OpenAI has switched from selling ads solely on a cost-per-mile (CPM) basis to also giving advertisers a cost-per-click option, which now makes up most of the ad spending on the platform.

“We are clearly in the advertising business now,” said Denise Dresser, the company’s chief revenue officer.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week about findings from the digital data research platform Similarweb which showed that 83% of the queries triggering ads inside ChatGPT would never have activated a Google Shopping ad.

This gap “isn’t incidental, it’s structural,” the report said, noting that AI assistants are reaching shoppers at stages in the buying journey that keyword-based search wasn’t meant to monetize.

“The difference is how each system reads intent. Google Shopping matches ads to declared product queries,” PYMNTS added. “ChatGPT surfaces ads during problem-solving conversations, research sessions and multi-turn exchanges, where commercial intent develops gradually rather than arriving pre-labeled.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence found that 47% of online shoppers employed AI during their most recent purchase. ChatGPT’s share as a product research tool climbed from 2% to 30% in two years, the same research showed.