ChatGPT

Dominant conversational AI platform and emerging advertising surface; category creator and market leader in consumer-facing generative AI

ChatGPT is OpenAI's flagship conversational AI product, launched in November 2022, which rapidly became one of the fastest-growing consumer technology products in history, reaching 100 million users within two months of launch. Built on OpenAI's GPT series of large language models, ChatGPT offers both a consumer-facing chat interface and an enterprise platform (ChatGPT Enterprise/Team), along with an API that powers thousands of third-party applications. The platform has evolved from a pure AI assistant into a multifaceted ecosystem including image generation, voice interaction, web browsing, code execution, and a GPT Store for custom AI applications. From an AdTech perspective, ChatGPT represents one of the most significant emerging advertising surfaces of the mid-2020s. In 2025, OpenAI launched a formal advertising pilot program, partnering with Criteo as a key technology partner to explore native and contextual ad formats within the ChatGPT interface. This move signals OpenAI's intent to diversify revenue beyond subscriptions and API licensing, leveraging ChatGPT's massive and highly engaged user base. The platform's conversational context offers unprecedented targeting signal richness, as user intent is expressed explicitly in natural language queries. ChatGPT's significance in the AdTech ecosystem extends beyond its own ad inventory. It is reshaping search behavior, threatening traditional search advertising models (particularly Google's), and driving industry-wide conversations about AI-native advertising formats, attribution in conversational contexts, and the future of intent-based targeting. Brands, agencies, and ad tech vendors are actively developing strategies to reach consumers through AI-mediated discovery, making ChatGPT a central topic across the advertising technology landscape.