Amazon and OpenAI announced a partnership on Thursday that will let advertisers using Amazon Ads run sponsored placements inside ChatGPT, beginning with a pilot for select brands in the United States. The deal, detailed in an Amazon Ads blog post and reported by CNBC, marks a striking reversal for a retailer that has spent two years walling its store off from external AI assistants.

It is also a major vote of confidence in OpenAI's advertising business, which CNBC reports recently reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate — a figure that seemed fanciful when the company first began experimenting with sponsored placements less than a year ago. For anyone following the latest AI developments, the partnership signals that conversational advertising is moving from experiment to mainstream channel, with the world's largest online retailer now actively feeding it inventory.

How the Partnership Works

Under the integration, brands that already plan, create and optimize campaigns through Amazon Ads can extend them into a conversational ad experience within ChatGPT. Ad campaigns are set up and managed by Amazon, while OpenAI's ads system controls all ad delivery decisions, an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC. Ad units appear as text or images beneath ChatGPT responses and are clearly labeled as sponsored.

The mechanics favor intent-driven advertising. OpenAI has said ads are served below the end of a chatbot response — so a shopper asking ChatGPT for marathon training tips might see an ad for running shoes sold on Amazon in the results. Because Amazon Ads brings trillions of proprietary shopping, browsing and streaming signals to its demand-side platform, the company is effectively plugging its targeting apparatus into OpenAI's audience of chatbot users.

"Conversational ad placements are the fastest growing engagement opportunity for brands to reach new and existing audiences," said Chris Conetta, director of omnichannel supply at Amazon DSP, in the announcement. "With access to ChatGPT Ads, advertisers can now extend their campaigns further into where their customers are actively spending time in conversational chat platforms."

Delta Vacations is among the first brands testing the format. "Trip planning is becoming increasingly personalized, and travelers expect relevant advertising," said Katrin Koenig, president of Delta Vacations, in Amazon's blog post.

A Reversal for Amazon

The partnership is notable partly because of Amazon's previous posture. The retailer has heavily restricted access to its sprawling webstore from AI platforms including ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, while investing in its own AI shopping tools — a stance rooted in the fear that chatbots would become a new front door to retail, capturing the customer relationship while Amazon became invisible plumbing.

But Amazon's behavior had already been shifting. According to CNBC, citing data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Amazon began quietly buying ads on ChatGPT and became the top retail company advertising on the platform between April and August. Letting its own advertisers buy placements is a far bigger step: it treats ChatGPT not as a threat to be contained but as a marketing channel worth cultivating.

The about-face also reflects Amazon's institutional interests beyond retail. Amazon is an investor in OpenAI following a $50 billion investment commitment completed earlier this year, and its AWS division competes to host AI workloads. A seat at the center of ChatGPT's commerce layer aligns with both positions.

A Boost for OpenAI's Ad Ambitions

For OpenAI, the deal addresses the ads business's central challenge: supply. Sponsored placements launched in the US in February, starting with retailers like Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma, and expanded to 31 European markets in August. But an ad platform is only as valuable as its advertiser base, and OpenAI lacks Amazon's decades-long relationships with brands and the massive retail media network that already manages their budgets.

By making Amazon Ads a conduit, OpenAI effectively gains thousands of advertisers overnight, along with Amazon's measurement and optimization machinery. Analysts cited by CNBC suggest that as OpenAI's ad revenue grows, it will begin taking share from Google, Meta and TikTok — the established triopoly of digital advertising.

The scale of the audience makes the opportunity real. OpenAI said in February that ChatGPT had reached 900 million weekly active users, and the company's ad inventory now spans one of the largest sustained attention pools on the internet.

What It Means for Advertisers and Users

For brands, conversational ads promise something search and social feeds cannot: placement at the exact moment a user is actively comparing options and making a decision. Amazon's blog post frames the integration as a way to reach customers "while they explore options, compare possibilities, and make decisions in ChatGPT."

Open questions remain. Ad performance in a chat interface is unproven at scale, and brands will want evidence that conversational intent converts better than search intent before shifting serious budgets. Measurement standards for chatbot advertising are still nascent.

Privacy and regulation loom larger. In Europe, where ChatGPT ads launched in August, targeting that draws on what users type into a chatbot sits in largely uncharted territory under the region's strict data protection regimes. Neither company's announcement details how conversational targeting will comply with those rules, and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are likely to want answers.

For users on ChatGPT's free tiers, the direction of travel is unmistakable: the assistant that began as a research demo is now a fully commercial platform, and the world's biggest retailer just became one of its biggest boosters.

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