The advertising industry has spent the better part of two years trying to figure out what to do about artificial intelligence, which is a bit like watching someone try to decide whether to befriend or fence in a particularly clever dog that has wandered onto the property.
Amazon Ads and OpenAI have now answered at least part of that question by announcing a partnership that will allow advertisers to place ads inside ChatGPT, the conversational AI service that has become, depending on whom you ask, either humanity's new research assistant or its eventual replacement.
Under the arrangement, advertisers will be able to reach OpenAI's users through Amazon's demand-side platform, extending campaigns that already run through the retail giant's advertising apparatus. The partnership is currently being tested with advertisers in the United States, Amazon said.
The timing suggests a certain inevitability. Sensor Tower, the market intelligence firm, tracked a 163 percent increase in ads served per user per hour of time spent on ChatGPT in the United States in August, compared with April. (One imagines the AI itself could have predicted this trajectory, had anyone thought to ask.)
For Amazon, which has spent years building an advertising business that now rivals those of Google and Meta, the deal represents another surface on which to sell. For OpenAI, which has been seeking revenue streams beyond subscriptions, it represents an answer to the question of how one monetizes a tool that many users have come to treat as indispensable.
The partnership is, in one sense, utterly unremarkable: a company that sells advertising has found a new place to sell it. In another sense, it marks the moment when the machine that was supposed to change everything became, like everything else, a place to reach consumers.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Amazon and OpenAI Team Up to Target ChatGPT’s US Users"