OpenAI is taking another step toward making advertising inside ChatGPT more interactive. The company is testing a new format called Sponsored Agents that lets users start a conversation with an AI agent representing a business after clicking one of its ads.

The experiment is part of a broader expansion of ChatGPT Ads that OpenAI announced on September 16. Alongside Sponsored Agents, the company is introducing new AI-powered tools for advertisers and integrations with HubSpot and Shopify as it builds out its advertising platform.

For users, the biggest change is that an ad can now lead directly into a conversation rather than simply sending them to a company’s website.

Ads become conversational

Sponsored Agents are designed to give people a way to ask questions about a product or service immediately after seeing an advertisement.

OpenAI describes a scenario involving a dining table. Someone might see the table in an ad but still want to know whether it will fit in their space, how many people it seats, or how to care for its finish. With Sponsored Agents, the user can choose to start a conversation with an AI representative sponsored by the business and ask those follow-up questions inside ChatGPT.

The experience is clearly labeled as sponsored. Users can explain what they are looking for, ask additional questions and, when they are ready, follow a link to the advertiser’s website.

That makes the format notably different from a conventional display or search ad. Instead of asking users to leave the platform and find information themselves, the advertiser gets an opportunity to participate in the consideration process through an AI-powered conversation.

OpenAI says the Sponsored Agent conversation is separate from both ChatGPT’s independent answers and the original conversation the user started. That distinction is important: the sponsored agent is not presented as ChatGPT independently recommending a product or service.

The test is limited to selected U.S. advertisers

Sponsored Agents are not broadly available to every advertiser yet. OpenAI says it is testing the format with select advertisers in the United States.

OpenAI’s Help Center currently describes Sponsored Agents as a limited alpha test available only to selected advertisers. Users may encounter Sponsored Agents in ChatGPT even when the format is not available for their own advertising campaigns.

The company has also opened a registration form for businesses interested in future Sponsored Agent testing through its HubSpot integration. OpenAI says access is limited and subject to review, with potential beta participants expected to meet eligibility requirements.

For now, that makes Sponsored Agents more of an early experiment than a standard ChatGPT advertising format.

OpenAI is giving advertisers more AI tools, too

Sponsored Agents are only one part of OpenAI’s latest advertising push.

The company is also making it possible for advertisers to manage campaigns using natural-language prompts through ChatGPT and its Ads Manager tools. Advertisers can use prompts to create, update and analyze campaigns, including turning a website or advertising brief into a campaign.

Ads Manager is also gaining AI assistance for creative work. OpenAI says advertisers can receive suggested ad copy and imagery based on their landing page and campaign objective. Advertisers can review and edit those suggestions before adding them to a campaign.

There is also an optional AI-powered text customization feature. When enabled, it can adapt existing headlines and descriptions to better match the context of a conversation and automatically translate ad copy into a user’s preferred language.

In other words, OpenAI is working on both sides of the advertising equation: making ads more conversational for users while using AI to automate more of the work involved in creating and managing them.

ChatGPT Ads are moving closer to the shopping experience

The Sponsored Agents experiment also fits into OpenAI’s broader effort to make ChatGPT a place where people discover products, compare options and make purchasing decisions.

The company says HubSpot is its first CRM partner for ChatGPT Ads, allowing businesses using HubSpot to connect their advertising accounts, create campaigns, track performance and follow up on leads from within HubSpot. Shopify is the first ecommerce partner, with a ChatGPT Ads app that lets eligible merchants connect product catalogs and measurement tools.

OpenAI says the Shopify integration is available to U.S. merchants initially, with international availability in markets where ChatGPT Ads are supported beginning September 23.

Taken together, these integrations suggest that OpenAI isn’t treating ChatGPT Ads as an isolated advertising product. The company is building connections between advertising, product catalogs, customer data, campaign management and the eventual conversion.

What Sponsored Agents could mean for ChatGPT

The interesting part of Sponsored Agents is the change in what an advertisement can actually do.

Traditional online advertising generally creates a handoff: an advertiser pays to put a message in front of someone, and the user clicks through to another destination. Sponsored Agents introduce an intermediate step where the advertiser can have a conversation with the potential customer before that person decides whether to visit the company’s website.

That could be particularly useful for products where buyers have questions that aren’t easily answered by a conventional ad. A furniture retailer could answer questions about dimensions and materials. A technology company could explain product differences. A travel business could respond to questions about a particular offering.

But the separation between sponsored conversations and ChatGPT’s independent answers will remain an important part of how the feature works. OpenAI explicitly says Sponsored Agent conversations are distinct from ChatGPT’s own answers and from the user’s original conversation.

For OpenAI, the experiment represents another step in turning ChatGPT into an advertising platform built around the way people increasingly use AI: asking questions, considering options and continuing the conversation before making a decision.

For now, Sponsored Agents remain a limited test with selected U.S. advertisers. Whether they eventually become a standard part of ChatGPT Ads will depend on how OpenAI develops the format and how users respond to having advertiser-backed AI agents inside the ChatGPT experience.