OpenAI opened a beta on Nov. 10 that lets companies claim a verified presence inside ChatGPT and, for some of them, deploy an AI agent that answers questions about their products directly inside a conversation. The feature, called Businesses in ChatGPT, is OpenAI's clearest move yet to turn its chatbot into a venue where companies compete for customer attention, not just a place people go to ask questions.
In its announcement, OpenAI said the goal is to give businesses accurate control over how they appear when ChatGPT's roughly 1.2 billion weekly users ask about them. Through a new Business Hub, verified companies can update details like pricing and stock, and see analytics on how often ChatGPT mentions them, how many people click through to their site, and what topics come up most often in those conversations. OpenAI has not published uniform verification rules; a company spokesperson told reporters that different methods apply depending on the business, with options including a phone number, business email, website domain or Shopify account.
Agents that speak for the brand
A smaller set of eligible U.S. e-commerce and online-service businesses can go further and build a Business Agent: a chatbot that represents the brand when it comes up in a user's conversation, fields follow-up questions and compares products, using instructions and context the company supplies. OpenAI says these exchanges are clearly labeled and kept separate from a user's main ChatGPT conversation, and that it does not share the content of either kind of chat with the businesses involved.
The launch follows a narrower test of Sponsored Agents that OpenAI ran with a small group of U.S. advertisers in September, and the company says it expects to extend both the Hub and the agents to more business categories and markets over time. Coverage of the rollout notes that OpenAI's own post frames the launch modestly, describing it as "an early step in bringing businesses more deeply into ChatGPT" rather than a finished advertising product.
The move puts ChatGPT more squarely in competition with Google, Amazon and Meta for the attention — and ad and commerce revenue — of businesses trying to reach customers through conversational AI, at a moment when OpenAI has been under pressure to show a path to sustainable revenue beyond subscriptions. It is also a test of how much commercial activity users will tolerate inside a chat interface they have mostly used for open-ended questions. OpenAI has not said when Business Agents will expand beyond U.S. e-commerce, or whether it plans to charge businesses for placement rather than just verification.
