Amazon Ads and OpenAI have entered a partnership that lets advertisers place campaigns inside ChatGPT, using Amazon's demand-side platform as the buying entry point. The arrangement is in pilot with US advertisers as a way to extend existing Amazon campaigns into a conversational ad format, Amazon said.
The move gives OpenAI's ad business a powerful new funnel. Amazon's DSP is a major gateway to retail ad budgets, and its sales teams will help advertisers set up and manage ChatGPT campaigns — a managed-service layer that lowerers the barrier for brands wary of the format. ChatGPT accounts for the bulk of OpenAI's advertising revenue, and OpenAI has said that business is on track to exceed $1 billion over the next 12 months. Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower tracked a 163 percent increase in ads served per user per hour spent in ChatGPT in the US in August compared with April.
The partnership also deepens the ties between two companies that have been both collaborators and competitors. OpenAI and Amazon announced a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar cloud and enterprise partnership earlier this year, and Amazon has been positioning its AWS services and ad platform around the AI buildout. Now the two are linking the two halves of the AI economy: models and monetization.
It is a notable bet on a controversial model. Advertisers have long worried that ad-supported AI assistants blur the line between answer and promotion, and OpenAI has faced scrutiny over how sponsored results are labelled. ChatGPT ads are already an opt-in experience for some users in chat with a shopping intent. Amazon's entry comes as ChatGPT reaches roughly 900 million weekly users — a reach that makes it, for brands, increasingly hard to ignore.
For OpenAI, ad revenue is part of a broader push toward profitability as compute costs soar. For Amazon, the deal extends its ad network into the fastest-growing surface in tech. The pilot's results — and how transparently sponsored answers are marked — will determine how fast the rest of the ad world follows.
