The artificial intelligence company that spent its early years insisting it was not in the advertising business is now, it would appear, very much in the advertising business.

OpenAI, the San Francisco company behind ChatGPT, said this week that it would begin selling advertising in 31 European markets, a significant expansion for what has become, almost by accident, one of the most-visited digital properties in the world.

Colin Fleming, who joined OpenAI as enterprise chief marketing officer after a long tenure at ServiceNow, said during a briefing that the company's advertising revenue had grown more than 25 percent since the start of August. He described the European push as "material expansion for us."

The numbers Mr. Fleming cited suggest why the company might be feeling expansive: ChatGPT now attracts one billion weekly active users, he said, with roughly 20 percent of them displaying what he called "commercial intent." (In the advertising trade, this is the polite way of saying that one in five users appears to be ready to buy something, which is the sort of statistic that makes media buyers reach for their checkbooks.)

The move places OpenAI more squarely in competition with the established digital advertising giants — Google, Meta, Amazon — whose own search and discovery products are increasingly being compared, sometimes unfavorably, to conversational AI tools. Whether advertisers will follow their audiences into the chat window, and whether those audiences will tolerate the intrusion, remains the central question of this particular experiment.

For OpenAI, which began as a nonprofit research laboratory with lofty pronouncements about the future of human intelligence, the pivot to advertising represents something of a philosophical journey. The company has traveled, in the span of a few years, from pondering the alignment problem to pondering the click-through rate.

It is not the first organization to discover that scale, once achieved, tends to suggest its own business model.

Original story published in adweek.com: "OpenAI Is Taking Its Ad Business to 31 New European Markets"