OpenAI Puts Advertisers Third in ChatGPT's Ad Hierarchy

OpenAI has signed more than 50 ad tech, measurement and agency partners in less than a year — but the company ranks advertisers third in its priorities, behind user trust and user value. Benji Shomair, OpenAI's VP of monetization, laid out the pecking order on Monday at LUMA's Digital Media Summit in New York City, in an on-stage conversation with LUMA Partners CEO Terry Kawaja.

The rationale starts with OpenAI's charter, which pledges to bring the benefits of artificial general intelligence — AI that can match or outdo people at intellectual tasks — to all of humanity. Kawaja's on-stage quip about that mission: "Asterisk, without killing us."

Reaching everyone, Shomair said, requires getting far more people to use ChatGPT than will ever pay for it. "Actually requires [us] to build an ad business," he said of the mission. "We believe this technology is so beneficial, so incremental, so powerful that we need to create economic means to make it available to everyone."

Why is trust the first priority?

Ads have never entered an environment as intimate as ChatGPT, Shomair argued. "Just think about the things that people are sharing with ChatGPT," he said. His framework: get user trust and user value right, and advertiser value follows.

That framework sometimes means saying no to partners. "We're taking a partner-first approach," Shomair said. "We can't do it all ourselves; it's pragmatic." But he added: "There are places where I think our partners would like us to do certain things that we just can't, and that's because of how we think about making decisions."

Five principles guide those decisions:

• Mission alignment
• Answer independence
• Conversation privacy
• Choice and control
• Prioritizing user trust and user experience over revenue

OpenAI devised the principles before it started testing ads internally, and they still shape every product decision. "We reference these principles on a pretty consistent basis, and we use this as a way to communicate to our audiences how we're thinking about trust," Shomair said.

What about the competition's punchlines?

Ads inside AI chats remain an easy target. Anthropic's Super Bowl spots for Claude this year mocked the concept — one showed a trainer responding to a six-pack question by hawking height-boosting insoles; another showed a therapist plugging a dating site connecting "sensitive cubs" with "roaring cougars."

The jokes worked commercially. Claude's daily downloads jumped from roughly 63,000 in January to a peak of about 225,000 in mid-February, according to Appfigures, and daily active users rose 11% after the game, per BNP Paribas.

Shomair conceded the ads were funny but said they don't reflect OpenAI's approach, where answers "are separate from the ads and not influenced by the ads."

What should ads even look like in AI?

Shomair, who joined OpenAI last December after helping build Meta's ads business, said new modes of engagement force fresh thinking. What does advertising look like when a consumer talks to a brand's AI agent, when their own agent shops for them, or when two agents talk to each other? He doesn't presume to know. Even the people building these systems are experimenting.

"It's hard to forecast beyond six to 12 months," he said. "The products I was working with 12 months ago versus the products I'm working on now – it's like night and day."

His advice to advertisers is blunt: "You've got to get your hands dirty. You've got to jump in and play with it."