OpenAI has signed Smartly, the Helsinki-based advertising automation platform, as its first creative ad-tech partner, Business Insider reported exclusively on April 1. The partnership’s goal: build interactive ad formats inside ChatGPT where users can click an ad and enter a chatbot-style conversation with a brand, rather than seeing a static card beneath a response.
This is a distinct escalation from the contextual placements OpenAI launched in February, which showed labeled ads alongside ChatGPT responses to product-related queries. Smartly CEO Laura Desmond told Business Insider that the company’s “ultimate goal” is to help OpenAI create personalized ads that users interact with directly. She cited a Boots UK campaign on Meta platforms as the template: a chatbot popped up when users clicked the ad and served gift recommendations through a series of questions. Smartly said that format drove nearly five times the sales of Meta’s standard ad placements.
The Commercial Infrastructure Taking Shape
Smartly is the creative optimization layer. OpenAI previously signed Criteo as its ad-placement partner, connecting approximately 17,000 advertisers to ChatGPT inventory since March 2, according to The Next Web. OpenAI also hired David Dugan, a former Meta vice president who ran global clients and agencies for over a decade, to lead a new global advertising solutions team reporting to COO Brad Lightcap. Self-serve ad tools — which would drop the current $200,000 minimum commitment — are scheduled to launch this month, per The Next Web.
The numbers behind the push: OpenAI’s ad pilot crossed $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks of its February 9 launch, with more than 600 advertisers and fewer than a fifth of eligible users seeing ads. ChatGPT has 800 million weekly active users, but only about 5% pay for subscriptions. Initial CPMs sit around $60 per thousand impressions, and Criteo reports that LLM-referred users convert at 1.5x the rate of other channels, The Next Web reported.
What This Means for Agent Builders
The conversational ad format is the first time ChatGPT’s agent-style dialogue interface has been explicitly repurposed as an advertising product. For builders deploying ChatGPT-backed agents in customer-facing workflows, this introduces a new variable: the conversational interface users associate with AI assistance will also host brand dialogues. OpenAI says ads remain clearly labeled, conversations stay private from advertisers, and no ads appear near health, mental health, or political topics. Users under 18 are excluded.
The question for agent builders running on OpenAI’s stack is whether conversational ads change user expectations of the interface. When a user clicks a Boots UK chatbot ad inside ChatGPT, the interaction mimics the same conversational pattern the user just had with the AI assistant. If that blurs the line between organic responses and sponsored dialogues, the trust surface that agent builders rely on shifts. OpenAI has publicly committed to keeping ads separate from organic answers, but the format itself — a chatbot within a chatbot — tests that boundary in ways static placements did not.