OpenAI is letting advertisers talk back. On Wednesday the company began testing Sponsored Agents, a format that drops a clearly labeled chat window into ChatGPT Ads so a curious buyer can question a business right after noticing its promotion.
Chats opened this way stay outside the assistant’s own answers and away from whatever thread the person was already in. OpenAI’s illustration involves a dining table ad and a buyer with practical questions: will it fit, how many diners can it seat, and how should the finish be treated?
Wider changes arrived alongside it. Advertisers can now state a goal in plain language and let the Ads Manager plugin assemble a campaign from a brief or a website, then review results and recommendations. Draft ads come with suggested text and images pulled from the advertiser’s landing page, and a person signs off before anything runs. An optional switch rewrites headlines to suit the surrounding chat and renders copy in the reader’s preferred tongue.
Two partnerships carry the most weight for smaller advertisers. HubSpot is OpenAI’s first CRM partner, so its customers can build and monitor ads and chase leads inside HubSpot itself, using context already stored there. US Shopify sellers get an app that connects a ChatGPT Ads account, mirrors inventory through Shopify Catalog and builds campaigns from the product list, with analytics covering spend, click-through rate, conversions and cost per acquisition. Both opened September 16, 2026, and Shopify’s version reaches ChatGPT Ads markets abroad on September 23.
Best Buy and Lowe’s are on the launch roster. So are Newegg and VistaPrint.
OpenAI is also dangling $500 in ad credit for newcomers who spend the same.
