OpenAI is preparing to turn ChatGPT into an advertising platform, posting a new role for an engineer to build systems for ad integration, campaign management, and attribution. The move could position ChatGPT as a new challenger to Google, Meta, and Amazon’s ad businesses. Already a major driver of referral traffic to retailers like Walmart, Etsy, and Target, ChatGPT has clear potential to evolve into a commerce and ad engine. But execution will be critical: Poorly integrated ads risk undermining user trust, even as AI-driven ad formats are projected to grow at triple-digit annual rates in the coming years.

OpenAI added restrictions for ChatGPT users under 18, prioritizing safety over freedom for teen users. The changes are in response to growing legal and regulatory pressure surrounding AI chatbot risks to minors, per TechCrunch. By segmenting teen and adult experiences, OpenAI sets a precedent that forces advertisers to rethink how and where they engage with users. Age gating pushes marketers to balance reach with responsibility. Those who adapt early—auditing media buys, vetting AI tools, and leaning into ethical safeguards—will secure trust and minimize regulatory risk.

Shoppers are using AI tools at a high rate but are split on brands’ use of AI-generated content and whether companies are delivering on customer experience promises. Half (52%) of consumers are excited by the idea of having an AI agent shop on their behalf, per VML. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say AI-powered personalization helps them discover new products, but 45% think brands are still failing to tailor recommendations effectively. Brands can keep shoppers engaged by demonstrating AI’s value in tangible ways—like smarter recommendations and smoother checkout—rather than relying on broad claims of AI integration.

Anthropic’s Claude AI is taking on competitors in a multimillion dollar ad campaign. The “Keep Thinking” campaign positions Claude as “the AI for problem solvers” and marks Anthropic’s first foray into brand marketing. The campaign is a necessary start to help Claude gain market share and boost its comparatively small user base, but it’s only the first step in a long journey ahead for Anthropic.

Affiliate marketing publishers benefited from jittery consumers buying to get ahead of tariff-induced price increases. But consumers’ increasing reliance on genAI for shopping help has alarmed affiliate publishers and advertisers.

AI is rewriting the rules of digital media, advertising, and commerce at breakneck speed. Here’s what players in the digital realm can do to stay relevant.

OpenAI revised its projected cash burn through 2029 to $115 billion—about 230% higher than earlier estimates. This alteration demonstrates how capital-intensive model training and deployment have become and how far those costs are beyond what traditional startup economics can sustain. These financial forecasts illustrate a ballooning cash burn matched by surging investments and rising revenue expectations. OpenAI might need to explore tactics like affiliate links or in-chat advertising for monetization and added incentives and premium features to convert free users into paying ones.

Our exclusive data explores how social commerce and AI are reshaping the beauty path to purchase for US consumers.

The news: Apple will reportedly launch an AI-enabled web search tool powered by Google’s Gemini, potentially accelerating long-awaited software improvements and helping Apple enter the AI search race, per Bloomberg. The “answer engine” would be integrated with Siri and could help Apple compete with OpenAI and Perplexity. The feature, internally called World Knowledge Answers, will aggregate information from across the web into AI Overviews-esque summaries. It may eventually be added to Safari and Spotlight. Our take: Apple’s pivot toward external AI partnerships highlights how unready it is to compete head-to-head in foundational AI or search. While a Gemini integration could improve Siri and add powerful search capabilities, it could threaten Apple’s core advantage: total control over the user experience.

The news: Use of AI search tools is surging, which could soon spell trouble for Google’s market dominance. The share of consumers using of AI search tools on a daily basis doubled to 29% in August, per HigherVisibility’s 2025 How People Search Today report, up from 14% in February. Meanwhile, Google’s share of general information queries fell from 73% to 67%. Our take: Brands and marketers need to tailor their campaigns and strategies based on user intent. Those looking to attract new shoppers should invest in social media and AI search placements, while those focused on driving traffic for services or capturing high-intent buyers should prioritize Google, especially for initial discovery and location-based queries.

Voice assistants will add nearly 30 million US users between 2022 and 2029, fueled by genAI, demographic shifts, and new hardware. Key adoption trends, platform battles, and marketing opportunities are shaping the next era of voice technology.

If social media is a digital shopping mall, genAI assistants are personal shoppers. As AI gains ground, it could disrupt established social shopping behaviors.

Retailers have built lucrative revenue streams from retail media networks (RMNs), leveraging on-site ad inventory and first-party transaction data. As the potential grows for consumers to shop through AI agents instead of retailer sites or apps, those data streams and ad surfaces are at risk.

The news: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is warning of a growing AI investment bubble. “Are we in a phase where investors are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes,” Altman said during a dinner with a group of reporters, per The Verge. Still, he emphasized that AI remains “the most important thing to happen in a very long time.” Our take: Altman’s warning about an AI bubble applies to marketers too. The temptation to chase every shiny new AI tool is real, but teams should develop an AI experimentation roadmap with clear outcomes to avoid wasting resources. Pushing vendors for case studies can help maximize budgets.

AI shopping assistants are reshaping product discovery and threatening retail media’s search-driven model. RMNs and advertisers need to adjust strategies to protect their market position and seize the opportunity to turn disruption into growth.

The news: OpenAI’s GPT-5 could be the start of ChatGPT becoming a transaction-driven super app that monetizes user intent, not attention. GPT-5’s router—which analyzes queries and decides how hard to “think” based on complexity—lets OpenAI invest more resources during high-intent moments like “compare hiking boots under $200” or “best smart TVs for co-op gaming.” Prioritizing queries with high commercial value could help OpenAI monetize users not through ads but via affiliate or take-rate revenues, per SemiAnalysis. Partnerships with Shopify and others suggest that monetization stack is already on the way. Our take: A full-service ChatGPT that’s intuitive enough to guide full shopping journeys inside a chatbot while keeping backend costs minimal could rewrite the AI platform’s business model. Brands should be working to optimize for AI-native commerce and integrate with agentic tools.

The news: Despite consumers’ rising use of AI agents for search, shopping, and discovery, brands are falling behind on generative engine optimization (GEO) strategies. 47% of brands have no deliberate GEO strategy or have no idea if they appear at all in AI agent responses, per a new report from Cordial. Another 47% have only just begun optimizing content for AI discovery. Our take: To boost visibility, brands should optimize for conversational context and create structured, machine-readable content that AI can index, like clear website FAQs, TL;DR summaries, and detailed product specs. Expanding presence across social platforms that feed AI training models, such as Reddit, Quora, and YouTube, can also improve chances of surfacing in AI-generated responses.

The news: GenAI models can easily be influenced to perpetuate false health facts when they’re fed made-up medical terms and information, per a new Mount Sinai research published in Nature last week. Our take: As more consumers rely on open GPT models for health answers, misinformation and intentional disinformation pose growing risks to both personal and public health. There’s an opportunity for healthcare and pharma marketers to step up science-based AI marketing and communications, such as Pfizer’s custom genAI medical query tool Health Answers that sources answers from medical journals and peer-reviewed research.

The news: OpenAI is bringing its newest models to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the first time, marking a major milestone in the ongoing battle for AI cloud dominance. Its open-weight models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b—available via Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker AI platforms—are able to handle complicated text-based operations and integrate into cloud-based systems. Our take: OpenAI’s models are getting easier to access, meaning lower costs and fewer technical hurdles to trying powerful AI tools. AWS customers should start testing oss-120b and oss-20b for things like generating subject lines, social copy, and campaign variations and explore ways to fine-tune the models with company data.

The news: Amazon plans to put ads in its AI-powered Alexa+ voice assistant to boost product discovery and profits. Our take: If Amazon rolls out sponsored answers to Alexa+ user queries or in-conversation ads, the voice assistant’s vast trove of personal user data will help marketers target consumers on a micro level. However, if hallucinations arise and lead to irrelevant or inaccurate product recommendations, Amazon risks eroding both user trust and brand confidence.