OpenAI Tests Sponsored Agents in ChatGPT Ads

According to the announcement, a Sponsored Agent conversation keeps three boundaries. It is clearly labeled as sponsored, it is distinct from the answers ChatGPT gives on its own, and it opens separately from the conversation the user was already having. OpenAI used the example of a shopper who sees a dining table in an ad and wants to know whether it fits their space, how many people it seats, and how to care for the finish. Seeing the ad, the company explained, is only the start of the interest.

The 32-second demo video on the announcement page, which METAL reviewed, shows that flow on screen. In a chat asking for quick, healthy dinners for a family, ChatGPT suggests three dishes, and an ad card from a grocery business appears underneath. When the user taps the chat button on the card, the name at the top of the screen switches from ChatGPT to that business, three meal kits appear as cards, and the agent answers a follow-up question about which one is easiest on a busy weeknight. The ad is no longer a banner beside an answer but a door into a whole conversation.

Several tools for the people making the ads shipped the same day. Advertisers can now turn on the Ads Manager plugin inside ChatGPT and create, update, and analyze campaigns with natural-language prompts. Turning a website address or a one-page brief into a campaign, reading performance, and getting a recommendation on what to do next all happen in a single conversation. AI assistance is also built into Ads Manager itself: when drafting an ad, it reads the landing page and campaign objective and suggests copy and imagery. Advertisers review and edit the suggestions before deciding whether to add them to a campaign.

An opt-in feature called AI text customization also opened. When enabled, it rewrites an advertiser's registered headlines and descriptions to fit the context of a conversation and automatically translates the ad copy into the language the user is using. From a marketer's seat, this is the quietest and the biggest change. Until now, ad copy was fixed when the campaign was built; now the same ad goes out in different sentences depending on what conversation a person is having. The habit of making a few creative variants and splitting them across audiences shifts toward changing the sentence for each individual conversation.

Existing tools were connected too. OpenAI named HubSpot its first CRM partner and Shopify its first ecommerce partner. Businesses that manage their customers in HubSpot can, from that day, connect a ChatGPT Ads account and create ads, track performance, and follow up on leads inside HubSpot, while US-based Shopify merchants create and manage campaigns with the ChatGPT Ads app in the Shopify App Store. Products are already integrated through Shopify Catalog, so ads can run right away, and the app expands from September 23 to other countries where ChatGPT Ads are available.

HubSpot explained where the integration came from in a press release issued the same day from Cambridge, Massachusetts. HubSpot said it launched the first CRM connector for ChatGPT in 2025, and that weekly active users of that connector have grown 250%, making it the most popular CRM connector for ChatGPT. The connector was updated as well, so that inside ChatGPT users can run email campaigns, build landing pages for ads, analyze closed-won deals, and optimize for AI search. The two companies also introduced an AI Growth Bundle combining HubSpot Starter and credits, ChatGPT Business seats, and ChatGPT Ads.

Brian Landsman, VP of Global Partnerships at OpenAI, said in the release, "Putting AI to work shouldn't require businesses to rebuild the way they work." He added that connecting ChatGPT with the customer knowledge in HubSpot helps teams do more with what they already know, from creating a campaign to preparing for a customer conversation. Duncan Lennox, Chief Product and Technology Officer at HubSpot, said, "We've been working with OpenAI because we share a belief that AI shouldn't just benefit the biggest companies." He explained that giving every scaling business a real shot at showing up where buyers are, understanding what is working, and acting on it quickly is what the partnership is about.

Advertisers should also weigh how established ChatGPT ads already are. OpenAI's advertiser page lists Newegg, Best Buy, Lowe's, and VistaPrint as early advertisers. Alec Shao, a performance marketing manager at Newegg, said on that page, "Newegg wants to be the place that naturally comes to mind at the moment people are deciding what to buy." On the same page OpenAI set out three principles: ads are kept separate from ChatGPT's answers, they are clearly labeled, and people decide how their data is used for ads.

According to reports, the ChatGPT Ads app in the Shopify App Store is free, is developed by OpenAI, and carries a listed launch date of September 3. The listing describes connecting an existing ChatGPT Ads account or creating one from Shopify, automatically syncing inventory information, and building ads from the product catalog, with targeting split into audience segments, custom audiences, device, location, platform, and product category. Performance metrics listed include ad spend, click-through rates, conversion tracking, and cost per acquisition. Other coverage read the announcement as OpenAI stepping deeper into an increasingly competitive market for AI-driven marketing.

ChatGPT ads are already a business of real scale. METAL has reported that ChatGPT ads passed a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate 200 days after launch, and has covered the platform's expansion to 31 European countries. This announcement layers a conversational ad format, production tools, and outside integrations on top of that at once.

For people who make content, this change alters the lifespan of a single ad. Until now an ad's job ended once it was shown and clicked, and the persuasion after that belonged to the landing page. Sponsored Agents pull that persuasion into a conversation inside ChatGPT, text customization rewrites the ad's sentences for every conversation, and the HubSpot integration passes the leads from that conversation straight into the CRM. The person planning an ad now has to design not one sentence but how the agent answers and how far it goes.

The test started with select US advertisers, and the announcement does not say which model powers Sponsored Agents, how conversation content reaches the advertiser, or when it opens to all advertisers. The phrase OpenAI put forward that day was an advertising platform with AI at its center. The place where people find, compare, and decide on products is moving into AI conversations, and advertising is moving into those conversations with them.