Amazon announced a partnership with OpenAI that allows advertisers on its platform to expand their advertising campaigns to appear within ChatGPT, with the step starting with the participation of a limited group of brands in the United States.
The partnership reflects growing confidence from Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce company, in OpenAI’s advertising activity, which is witnessing rapid growth, after recently reaching an annual revenue rate of one billion dollars.
Last February, OpenAI began offering paid ads within ChatGPT in the United States, with the participation of a number of retail companies, including Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma.
The move comes at a time when Amazon is pursuing a more stringent policy towards the access of competing artificial intelligence platforms, such as ChatGPT, Claude from Anthropic, and Gemini from Google, to its online store, in conjunction with the company developing its own tools for shopping with artificial intelligence.
During the past months, Amazon also began purchasing advertising space within ChatGPT, becoming, according to data from market research company Sensor Tower, the largest advertiser from the retail sector on the platform during the period from April to August.
Under the new agreement, Amazon will prepare and manage advertising campaigns, while OpenAI’s advertising system will be responsible for decisions to distribute ads and determine where they appear. Advertisements within ChatGPT will appear as text or images below the chatbot’s answers.
Amazon said that conversational ads, which appear within AI-powered chatbots, represent one of the fastest growing engagement opportunities for brands to reach existing and potential customers.
Making ads available within ChatGPT will give advertisers the opportunity to expand their campaigns to the conversational platforms where consumers are increasingly spending time, said Chris Cuneta, director of omnichannel supply at Amazon’s demand-based advertising platform.
This partnership comes in light of the gradual transformation of ChatGPT from a tool for conversation and research into a new marketing and advertising platform, with the intensification of competition between technology companies to commercially benefit from the accelerating spread of generative artificial intelligence.
