When advertising enters the conversation with consumers

On January 16, OpenAI began testing advertising formats in the U.S. within the ChatGPT interface, tied to users’ conversations with the chatbot. The move is expected to guide a global expansion and inaugurate a dynamic capable of reshaping the relationship between brands and consumers. More than opening a new advertising space, the initiative shifts the starting point of consumption decisions.

With this new monetization model, a question also arises: how will advertising operate in a scenario where it no longer competes for attention and instead influences choices without undermining user trust?

“What we are seeing now is a systemic shift. Brands no longer communicate primarily through advertising, which becomes an increasingly smaller slice of a communication ecosystem that is expanding exponentially,” says Ezra Geld, co-founder of Dez Solutions, a consultancy focused on media and communication. “This changes the economic balance of the advertising market and of the economy as a whole.”

For Geld, the transformation goes beyond traditional media placement. The challenge becomes creating conditions for advertisers to enter, legitimately, an environment of conversation with consumers. “The bigger game is how brands, AI platforms and users build dialogue with one another,” he says. “This impacts the economic foundations of the market in an irreversible way.”

This structural change becomes even clearer with OpenAI’s initiative. Just over a year ago, Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said that introducing ads would be the platform’s last resort. Although it was founded as a nonprofit organization in 2015, since 2019 OpenAI has operated under a hybrid structure that enables commercial activity.

With estimated annual revenue of $20 billion and commitments totaling about $1.4 trillion in computing capacity, the creator of ChatGPT has decided the time has come to revisit its business model.

For two decades, the advertising and marketing industry has operated around two main axes: the battle for attention in social media feeds and the capture of intent through search engines. ChatGPT introduces a third logic: assisted recommendation.

“This is not a question of advertising, but of business model,” says João Dabbur, co-founder of Dez alongside Geld. “AI is going through a moment of rapid commoditization. New models appear every week, with increasingly smaller performance differences.”

For Dabbur, it is still too early to know whether OpenAI will get the monetization model right and whether it will scale. “Experience shows that having an audience does not guarantee revenue. Many platforms have significant audiences but cannot turn that into results because they fail to get the interaction model with users and advertisers right. As a result, advertising does not scale, does not generate volume and does not create traction.”

Competition among AI startups is growing, but there is still no information about the adoption of ads in the interfaces of OpenAI’s main rivals. OpenAI remains the global leader in number of users. The Chinese startup DeepSeek saw rapid growth in 2025 with an open-source, free-access chatbot and plans to launch a new version this month. Google continues its AI push with Gemini. Last month, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told Sources, a news portal, that there are no plans to run ads on Gemini.

OpenAI’s move to introduce advertising appears not to have pleased Anthropic, developer of the Claude chatbot. Founded by former OpenAI executives, the company used one of the most coveted advertising slots on U.S. television — the Super Bowl — to poke fun at OpenAI’s ads during the National Football League (NFL) championship game held on Sunday (8).

The agency Mother created four commercials for Anthropic, aired during prime time on TV and on stadium screens. In one of the films, an AI-generated personal trainer guides a person through physical exercises. In the middle of the dialogue, the AI inserts an advertisement, as if it were an extension of the conversation. The film ends with the line: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

OpenAI’s initial promise is to preserve the user experience. According to the company, ads will appear at the bottom of chatbot responses and will not influence the generated content, which will remain focused on what is most useful to the user. Valued at around $500 billion, the startup said ads will be shown on the free version of ChatGPT and on the Go plan, which costs $8 per month. With more than 800 million weekly active users worldwide, ChatGPT has Brazil as its third-largest market, behind only the U.S. and India.

It is precisely this combination of massive reach and a conversational environment that redefines the challenge for brands and agencies. Ricardo John, partner and CEO of agency Isla in Brazil, believes advertising is entering unprecedented creative territory. “For the first time in many years, since the consolidation of social media feeds, we are facing a new creative space. The era of interruption gives way to contextual recommendation,” he says. “How do you preserve trust when the user knows there is a commercial incentive embedded in the interface?”

This concern connects with what Domenico Massareto, founder of AI creative consultancy Rain, calls the “mirror effect.” “ChatGPT is an on-demand content generator guided by the user, who leads the conversation. There is no dialogue with AI that does not originate in the user’s questions, paths and choices,” he says. This fragility is heightened because the chat is an intimate space of consultation, where recommendations tend to be accepted with less skepticism.

For Enricco Benetti, co-CEO of BFerraz, the new logic of the so-called recommendation era will challenge creatives to convince algorithms of their products’ quality and will require brands to present clear arguments consistent with context. “Advertising on ChatGPT will demand new attributes beyond the click, moving away from the attention auction logic of Google Ads toward a more contextual and personal recommendation.”

For Gabriel Borges, co-founder of Ampfy, it is naive to imagine a sustainable platform model without advertising. “Netflix said it would never have ads, but everyone ends up needing them — not only to make the business viable, but also to expand the user base. Advertising is also a growth strategy,” he says. “Google always had our history, but the relationship was superficial. Until now, it was an elevator conversation. With AI, it becomes a barroom conversation—longer and deeper.”