OpenAI exec envisions brands running ads by prompting ChatGPT

In a recent Episode 13 of The OpenAI Podcast, titled “The Thinking Behind Ads in ChatGPT” and hosted by Andrew Mayne on YouTube, Asad Awan, who leads OpenAI’s monetization efforts, explained how OpenAI plans to approach ChatGPT ads.

As part of the discussion, Awan talked about the challenge many small businesses face: running digital ads is complex and costly. He shared an example of friends who started an e-commerce shoe company. “When it came to ads, they actually had to hire like three performance marketers to do the work because it’s so, so cumbersome and analytical. If you don’t do it right, you could end up wasting a lot of money,” he said.

From that experience, Awan outlined OpenAI’s long-term vision. He sees a future where business owners could manage campaigns entirely through conversation with ChatGPT. Instead of manually adjusting budgets, audiences, or creatives, the AI would handle operational details while business owners focus on their objectives.

How conversational ad management would work

In this model, ChatGPT would act as a conversational agent for advertising. Business owners could simply describe what they want to achieve, such as selling a product in a specific region or staying within a budget. ChatGPT would then propose strategies, run experiments, and provide real-time recommendations.

Advertising remains complex, time-intensive, and expensive for small businesses. Hiring performance marketers can be one of the highest costs for companies trying to scale online. Platforms like Google, Meta, and TikTok require expertise in bidding strategies, creative testing, and audience segmentation.

According to the 2025 Small Business Advertising Trends Report published by Intuit, the average U.S. small business advertising budget is about $78,000 per year, or roughly $6,500 per month. This shows that small businesses commit significant marketing dollars to digital ads, and the complexity and cost of managing that spend can be a meaningful burden.

“Today, literally a small business has to hire performance marketers, which could be one of the biggest costs,” Awan said.

Awan’s response outlined a future where ChatGPT handles the operational complexity of ads, the “how,” leaving business owners to focus on outcomes, the “what.”

“I think the vision will be that it is as easy as just steering and telling what you need from your business. So, describing the what, but not having to think about how it will work. These are the constraints, and ads are created to run to match your constraints in some sense,” he said. 

According to him, business owners will only need to explain their goals and limits to ChatGPT instead of navigating dashboards, spreadsheets, and multiple platforms. For example, what they want to sell, where they want to sell it, and how much they want to spend, and the AI will handle all the details of creating, running, and optimizing the ads automatically.

“I do think the vision has to be where it is almost as easy as you are prompting nowadays for questions. You could say, ‘My goal is to sell these shoes more in the Midwest,’ and then it comes back. It’s like, ‘hey, I tried some experiments, and I think this is the right bid given your price point. This is the right way to do that. Do you want to spend more money on this?’ And then you continue that conversation, and it almost becomes an agent for that.”

Awan’s vision of conversational AI campaign management aims to reduce both the budget and the expertise required to run effective ads.

How OpenAI is thinking about trust and ad design in ChatGPT

OpenAI’s decision to start showing ads inside ChatGPT has drawn both curiosity and skepticism from industry observers. Unlike search and social networks, ChatGPT is built around text-based dialogue and personalized responses. 

During the podcast, Awan walked listeners through the design philosophy behind ChatGPT’s ads. They are separate from the model’s answers, clearly labeled, and built so the AI does not reveal private user conversations to advertisers. That separation, he said, is core to preserving users’ faith that their interactions with ChatGPT remain private and helpful.

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