OpenAI Lets Verified Brands Put Their Own AI Agents Inside ChatGPT

This gives OpenAI a new way to make money from the companies whose products its chatbot already recommends. Until now, a brand's presence in ChatGPT answers depended on what the model said about it. Business Agents give a company a voice of its own inside the conversation, and a companion dashboard called Business Hub shows how often the brand comes up.

According to The Verge, a user can open a Business Agent when a business that has built one appears in a response. The user can then ask about its products and follow up with questions such as how two items differ. Each business writes its agent's instructions and supplies the context the agent uses to answer. OpenAI said these chats will be clearly labelled and kept separate from the user's main ChatGPT conversation.

Verification is meant to show users that an agent really speaks for the company it names. Businesses can claim and verify their organisation through Business Hub. Benji Shomair, OpenAI's vice president of monetization, said at a press briefing that the company would not detail its verification methods because they vary from one business to another, The Verge reported.

Business Hub also gives companies data on their visibility in ChatGPT, including how often they are mentioned in responses and the top "discovery topics" in which they appear. That puts OpenAI into a market now served by third-party "AI visibility" tools, which try to estimate how chatbots talk about brands from the outside.

In a blog post quoted by The Verge, OpenAI called the launch "an early step in bringing businesses more deeply into ChatGPT". It said it was starting with "accurate business information, useful insights and conversations that help people make informed decisions". Later, it said, it would "explore more ways for businesses to connect with customers — directly or through agents and in ChatGPT and beyond."

OpenAI did not say whether Business Agents will cost businesses anything, when they will reach markets outside the US, or how agent conversations relate to the advertising it already sells in ChatGPT.

The tools had shown up before the announcement. On November 6, Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, posted a screenshot on LinkedIn of a banner reading "Claim your business in ChatGPT", Digiday reported. He told the publication he had first seen signs of the feature in August, and that connecting a Shopify store was one way to prove a business was genuine. Digiday said the beta dashboard it described logged impressions and clicks each day, without showing users' prompts or ranking businesses against competitors.

The launch builds on OpenAI's young advertising business. According to Digiday, ads in ChatGPT began testing in the US in February. By September, OpenAI said it had reached a $1 billion annualised run rate in under 200 days, and in late October it said more than 100,000 advertisers had run campaigns across 89 countries. Verified profiles and agents could draw in businesses that have not bought ChatGPT ads.

The open questions for brands are how OpenAI will decide which businesses qualify, and whether agent conversations will eventually affect which companies ChatGPT recommends in the first place.