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Future ChatGPT ads might actually talk to you 🔒
Source: Business Insider
April 1st, 2026

Summary: OpenAI has brought on ad tech company Smartly as its first partner focused on improving how ads look and perform in ChatGPT. Initially, Smartly will help brands adjust their creative messaging in real time based on user interaction. The bigger ambition is having ads that behave more like ChatGPT, responding to what a user is asking rather than just sitting alongside the answer. Smartly has run that kind of format for other clients on Instagram (calling it “conversational commerce”), with one campaign generating nearly five times the sales lift of standard ads. OpenAI says it now has more than 600 brands in its ads pilot and is on pace for $100M in annualized ad revenue.

Oh also, OpenAI raised $122B at an $852B valuation. It says its generating $2B in revenue per month, has 900M weekly active users, and 50M subscribers. But at the rate it’s burning, it’ll need to raise money again in 18-24 months. The company is expected to go public later this year.

Opinion: That’s a lot of money! Anyways, let’s talk about conversational commerce ads. We love this. Ads have always been more effective when they are ‘native’ to the environment they’re in. When people go to ChatGPT, they are in conversation mode, so ChatGPT having conversational ads makes a ton of sense. It could ask follow-up questions, refine its offers, and get more useful the longer you engage. That's a much stickier format than anything Google or Meta currently offer and would be truly ‘native’ to conversational AI.

Amazon's Rufus ads are now open for business 🔒

What It Does: Amazon is now charging for ads in Rufus, its AI shopping assistant, on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. The ads surface as suggested prompts inside shopper conversations, like "Why choose a [Brand X] shirt?" All existing sponsored products and sponsored brands campaigns in the US are automatically eligible, and advertisers will be opted in by default. The Information reports 🔒 that they seem cheaper too, at 31 cents per click, compared to 50 to 70 cents for standard Amazon ads.

Quick Take: Sponsored Prompts! They’re just like search ads! But … not really. They’re more about pushing a brand or product to a user, rather than a user specifically seeking out a product through a keyword search. Lots of potential here for mid- and upper-funnel impact. While we sit here and debate whether ChatGPT and Gemini will be able to make shopping ads work in AI, Amazon is already doing it.

Kargo's new Kera AI platform plans, creates, and buys ads for you

What It Does: Kargo says KERA can turn a campaign brief into a fully executed media plan, handling planning, creative production, audience targeting, and optimization in one system. It scores creative assets before launch using Kargo's performance data, then adjusts creative and inventory in real time once campaigns go live. Hershey, agency Wpromote, and travel media network Navigator are among the first partners in the closed beta.

Quick Take: The pitch is familiar: fewer tools, better outcomes, end-to-end agentic workflow. But do marketers actually want this? And if so, do they want it from an ad network? Shouldn’t the marketer’s agentic layer live further up the marketing stack?

Criteo launches AI-powered self-serve ad platform for smaller brands

What It Does: Criteo GO lets US and UK advertisers set a goal and budget, and it handles campaign configuration, creative production, and optimization automatically across display, video, native, and social. It draws on Criteo's commerce data, including 740M daily shoppers and $1T in annual transactions, to improve targeting and bidding.

Quick Take: Criteo has been a performance machine for enterprise e-commerce advertisers because of how they tie retargeting to creative to transaction data with a smart optimization engine on top. But bringing it to long-tail advertisers has been difficult because of all the work that goes into building dynamic product creative, campaign setup, and ongoing optimization. Enter, agentic AI! 

Slack gets major AI upgrade with 30 new features

What It Does: Salesforce is overhauling Slack around its AI agent, Slackbot, with 30 new features rolling out in the coming months. The biggest addition is reusable AI skills, which let users define a task once and have Slackbot run it automatically across different contexts. For example, typing "create a budget" for a specific event will trigger Slack to pull relevant info from channels and connected apps, build a plan, and schedule a meeting with the right people. That same skill can be used for other projects as well. Slackbot can also now transcribe and summarize meetings, monitor your desktop to suggest follow-ups, and connect to outside tools and agents.

Quick Take: Slackbot has a real advantage; Slack is where teams already spend a lot of time. But most marketers are already comfortable using standalone LLMs for these kinds of tasks, and the LLMs now seamlessly connect to email, calendars, docs, and project management tools. Slackbot may be too late. Slackbot may also be too annoying.

The Setup: Workday's content needs were outpacing its capabilities. As the company expanded globally, multiple business units needed more assets for more audiences and formats. That bandwidth challenge pushed Workday to rethink its content creation supply chain.

The AI Solution: Workday uses Adobe's customer data platform (CDP) as its data foundation and Adobe GenStudio solutions to connect creative development to content operations. Tools like Firefly help with early-stage ideation, letting teams generate and test visual directions quickly. Adobe Express helps non-designers quickly produce social assets, field marketing materials, and internal content using brand-approved templates. Adobe Workfront connects intake, approvals, and production in one place so marketing and IT have shared visibility across projects. The CDP directs audience signals into tools like Adobe Marketo Engage and LinkedIn for campaign activation. 

The Results: 

• 50% lower creative production costs

• Marketers can launch designs independently without going through the creative team

• 90% of Workday's marketers are licensed on Adobe Express

Why This Matters: This is also an upskilling success story. With 90% of its marketers now licensed on Adobe Express, Workday used its human workforce to maximize the potential of AI. 

Your Action: Pull up every creative request your team submitted to design in the last 90 days. You're looking for repeating formats — social posts for a campaign launch, field event one-pagers, internal sales decks following a standard structure. Pick the three highest-volume request types. For each one, build a brand-approved template in Adobe Express or Canva that a marketer can execute without needing approval from the creative team. Include locked brand elements (logo, colors, fonts) and editable zones for copy and imagery. Then measure two things: how long it takes to go from brief to live asset before vs. after, and how many design team hours that category consumed per month. That's your ROI. Once marketers can self-serve those three categories, move to the next tier. The goal is to redirect the creative team toward high-value work that actually requires original thinking.

Walmart and Carrefour both launch ChatGPT shopping integrations - Walmart launched a shopping app 🔒 inside ChatGPT where users can browse and check out via Walmart's payment systems; it's powered by its Sparky AI assistant. In France, Carrefour is letting shoppers build a grocery basket in ChatGPT before completing the purchase on Carrefour's site.

Google shows how to connect Google Analytics to Gemini and other LLMs - Gemini is becoming the new interface layer for just about every Google product.

The Guardian's first reader-facing AI product is a content navigation tool 🔒 - Called Storylines, it scans the 200 most recent articles on a topic and surfaces three narrative threads to help readers navigate coverage. 

WPP launched an AI tool that cuts down ads for YouTube and scores them for brand safety - YouTube 5K automatically shortens existing ads into 10-, 15-, and 20-second versions and scores them against YouTube's creative best practices. 

Anthropic Acquires Startup Coefficient Bio for About $400 Million 🔒 - The stealth startup works on applying AI to biological research. So Anthropic is buying biotech while OpenAI is buying media. 🤔

Making money on AI is hard - OpenAI's Sora only made $2.1M in 6 months. And running it cost $1M/day. No wonder it got shut down.

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