Written by Admin Alex · Fact-Checked by M.Ali · Info Verified September 2026
We review and update this article regularly as new information becomes available.
TL;DR: OpenAI is testing a ChatGPT ad format where clicking a “Chat with us” button opens a branded conversation with a company’s own AI agent, right inside ChatGPT, instead of redirecting to the brand’s website. Wayfair is one of the advertisers piloting it under what OpenAI calls its Sponsored Agent program, and OpenAI’s CFO has openly called the current ad formats just a “basic starting point.”
Click an ad, land on a website. That’s been the entire model of digital advertising since the banner ad was invented. OpenAI is testing something that skips the website step entirely.
How the new format actually works
In this pilot, an ad inside ChatGPT carries a “Chat with us” call-to-action instead of a link. Tap it, and instead of opening a browser tab, you start a conversation with a branded AI agent representing that company, still inside the ChatGPT interface. Wayfair is one of the advertisers testing this under what OpenAI internally calls the Sponsored Agent pilot. Morgan Brown, Wayfair’s director of paid media, described the approach carefully rather than triumphantly.
“We’re testing at limited scale with guardrails around product accuracy, transparency and service handoffs,” said Morgan Brown, Wayfair’s director of paid media.
That’s the language of a company that knows it’s handing part of its customer relationship over to somebody else’s AI and wants everyone to understand there are limits on that experiment for now.
OpenAI isn’t hiding that this is just phase one
Speaking at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia conference on September 8, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar was unusually direct about where the company sees advertising heading. She called the current formats, including this new conversational one, a “basic starting point,” adding that “this is all before we’ve really launched a format that feels truly endemic to AI.” Translation: what’s live right now is a rough draft, and OpenAI has a much bigger vision for what advertising inside a chatbot could eventually look like.
The obvious comparison is Meta’s long-running strategy of pushing users from ads into WhatsApp conversations with businesses, a model Meta has spent years refining specifically because keeping the interaction inside its own app gives Meta more data and more control over the experience than sending users away to an external site ever would.
The tension nobody’s fully solved yet
There’s a real question buried under all of this for brands like Wayfair. Sending a customer to your own website means you own that visit, that session, that data. Letting the conversation happen inside ChatGPT means OpenAI is the one hosting the relationship, and the brand is a guest in someone else’s living room. Early advertisers are betting that reaching people where they already are, mid-conversation, in the exact moment they’re asking about a product, outweighs the loss of that direct traffic and first-party data.
Whether that bet pays off probably depends on how good these branded agents actually are at answering real questions without hallucinating a return policy or promising a discount that doesn’t exist. Wayfair’s own careful phrasing about guardrails suggests that risk is very much on their mind too.
Bottom Line: This is a small pilot today, but it’s a preview of where AI advertising is actually headed: fewer clicks to websites, more conversations that never leave the AI app. Marketers should start thinking now about what it means to lose direct access to the customer data that used to come standard with every ad click.
