OpenAI has formally rolled out Sponsored Agents, the conversational ad format it had been quietly piloting with select retailers, and paired the launch with a broader set of tools for building and running ChatGPT ad campaigns. The company detailed the expansion in a blog post published Thursday, September 17.
Two weeks earlier, Digiday reported that OpenAI was testing Sponsored Agents in partnership with Wayfair, letting shoppers who clicked a furniture ad continue the conversation with a retailer-branded assistant inside ChatGPT. Thursday’s post moves that mechanic out of the pilot phase: OpenAI says the feature is “now being tested with select advertisers in the United States,” but the company is also shipping the surrounding infrastructure that turns a single retail experiment into a product line.
The core idea has not changed. A user who sees a sponsored ad in ChatGPT can start a clearly labeled chat with a business-sponsored agent, ask follow-up questions, and click through to the advertiser’s site when ready. OpenAI frames this as solving a real gap: an ad can spark interest, but it rarely answers whether a dining table fits a specific room or how many people a couch seats. What is new this week is everything OpenAI built around that interaction for the advertiser side of the business.
Advertisers using ChatGPT Work, the company’s workspace product, can now generate ad campaigns from a handful of natural-language prompts rather than building creative from scratch. Inside Ads Manager, OpenAI is adding AI tools that suggest copy and imagery pulled from an advertiser’s own landing page and stated campaign goals, with a review step before anything goes live. A separate opt-in feature will automatically adapt existing headlines and descriptions to the tone of a given conversation and translate copy into a user’s preferred language.
Inside the Ads Manager plugin, a plain-language request is now enough to spin up a campaign: an advertiser can hand it a website or a brief and get a live campaign back, along with performance analysis and next-step suggestions generated on the spot. Editing an existing campaign or checking how it is doing works the same conversational way, with no separate dashboard involved. That folds media buying into the same chat interface OpenAI is selling to consumers, an approach that mirrors how the company has bundled coding, search, and now advertising into a single product surface rather than a suite of standalone tools.
The integrations extend that logic outside ChatGPT entirely. HubSpot becomes OpenAI’s first CRM partner, letting businesses connect a ChatGPT Ads account and manage campaigns and lead follow-up from inside HubSpot using their existing customer data. Shopify is the first ecommerce partner: US merchants can install a ChatGPT Ads app from the Shopify App Store today, with product catalogs already synced through Shopify’s existing integration, and the app expanding to international markets on September 23.
OpenAI is explicit that these are its own claims about its own product: the blog post contains no independent measurement of how Sponsored Agents perform against click-through or conversion benchmarks used elsewhere in digital advertising, and OpenAI has not said how many advertisers are in the current test group. Google and Meta both took years to build ad businesses at the scale OpenAI is now assembling in a single product cycle, and neither started with a chat interface as the primary sales surface.
For marketers, the more concrete near-term decision is the CRM and ecommerce integrations rather than the agent format itself, since HubSpot and Shopify plug into workflows businesses already run daily. Any team evaluating a ChatGPT Ads pilot in the next quarter should treat the September 23 international Shopify rollout as the earliest point at which non-US merchants get a comparable on-ramp.
Reported from OpenAI’s own blog post, “Reimagining advertising with AI,” published September 17, 2026.
