OpenAI has begun piloting an ad unit that keeps shoppers inside ChatGPT instead of routing them to a brand’s website. Digiday reported that the company has shown select advertisers a format where clicking a button such as “Chat with us” opens a branded conversation with that company’s own AI agent, rather than a browser tab. Wayfair, the online furniture retailer, confirmed it is one of the participants.
The mechanic matters more than the interface tweak suggests. Every major ad platform has been defined by one signature unit: Google’s auctioned text link, Facebook’s News Feed placement, TikTok’s in-feed video. OpenAI has spent months hunting for its own, and a chat-native unit is a plausible candidate because it does not try to bolt a search-era ad onto a conversational product. It builds the ad out of the same material the product is made of.
OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, previewed the direction at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco on September 8. She described the ad units currently running beneath ChatGPT responses on the free and Go tiers as a “basic starting point” and said the company was seeing “early indications” of a format that felt native to AI rather than borrowed from search or social.
Wayfair’s director of paid media, Morgan Brown, told Digiday the retailer is “participating in OpenAI’s Sponsored Agent pilot to explore how conversational commerce can help customers make more informed, confident decisions,” and that the test runs “at limited scale with guardrails around product accuracy, transparency and service handoffs.” That framing signals OpenAI is treating the format as commerce infrastructure, not just a new banner shape.
Agency executives quoted by Digiday drew a comparison to Meta’s ads that funnel users into WhatsApp threads. Farhad Divecha, group chief executive of the agency Accuracast, said the approach lets brands qualify prospects inside the conversation before routing them to sales or support. That is a meaningfully different job than a click-through ad, which simply hands traffic to a landing page and lets the brand’s own site do the qualifying.
The bigger question is whether advertisers gain anything by letting OpenAI, rather than their own domains, own the customer interaction. Retailers have spent a decade building first-party data pipelines from their websites. Shamsul Chowdhury, senior vice president of paid media at Zeno Group, told Digiday that brands “want to get user data through their owned sites” but know the shopping journey now happens wherever the customer is. Ceding the conversation to a chatbot interface trades data ownership for presence inside a fast-growing surface, and OpenAI has not disclosed how much purchase and behavioral data advertisers actually receive back from these agent sessions.
Seven months into ChatGPT’s ad rollout, Digiday’s advertiser sourcing describes the platform as promising but unproven, with spending still confined to incremental or test budgets rather than core media plans. A conversational format that improves conversion could change that calculus heading into the holiday quarter, when marketers facing flat returns on Google and Meta are actively looking for a third channel. Chowdhury called strong execution “the big if,” and OpenAI has not disclosed adoption numbers, a rollout timeline, or performance benchmarks for the pilot. OpenAI did not respond to Digiday’s request for comment.
For performance marketers, the near-term move is to request access to the Sponsored Agent pilot and test it against existing ChatGPT placements before committing meaningful holiday-season budget, since the format’s advantage depends entirely on whether OpenAI’s agent handoffs convert as well as a well-optimized landing page.
Krystal Scanlon reported this for Digiday on September 14, 2026.
