OpenAI is testing an AI agent that fields shopper questions after an ad click, plus prompt-built campaigns and native HubSpot and Shopify integrations, changing who does the work an ad agency used to bill for.
A small business running its own ad campaigns usually faces a choice. Pay an agency roughly 10 to 20 percent of ad spend, often $750 to $3,000 a month, to write the copy, pick the audience, and manage the bids, or take that work on top of everything else the owner is already doing. That range comes from WebFX's 2026 PPC pricing breakdown, one of the more commonly cited industry benchmarks for what campaign management actually costs.
OpenAI just added a third option. On September 16, it announced Reimagining advertising with AI, rolling out several connected changes to ChatGPT Ads at once. Build the campaign with a prompt. Let an AI agent field a shopper's follow-up questions. Let the same system suggest the copy and images to go with it.
The most visible piece is Sponsored Agents. After someone clicks an ad inside ChatGPT, they can now choose to start a conversation with an agent that the advertiser sponsors, ask questions the way they'd ask ChatGPT anything else, and follow a link to the business's site when they're ready. OpenAI's own example is a shopper eyeing a dining table who wants to know if it fits their space or how many people it seats. The company is careful to note the conversation is clearly labeled and kept separate from ChatGPT's own answers. It's being tested with a select group of US advertisers, not rolled out broadly yet.
The second piece is aimed at the person who used to build the campaign. Advertisers can now write plain-language prompts inside ChatGPT's Ads Manager plugin to create, update, and analyze a campaign, including turning a website or a brief directly into one. Inside Ads Manager itself, the tool now suggests ad copy and imagery based on an advertiser's landing page and objective, and there's an optional feature that adapts existing headlines and descriptions to a conversation's context and translates them automatically. OpenAI says advertisers still review and edit anything before it goes live.
The third piece is distribution into tools businesses already use. HubSpot, OpenAI's first CRM partner, now lets a business connect its ChatGPT Ads account, create ads, and follow up on leads without leaving HubSpot. Shopify, its first ecommerce partner, has a new app in the Shopify App Store where US merchants can start running ads today, with products already tied in through Shopify Catalog. The app reaches other markets on September 23, per OpenAI, and TheNextWeb's reporting confirms the same rollout details the same day.
This isn't a side experiment. OpenAI's ad business crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate by August 31, fewer than 200 days after Ads Manager opened self-serve access to small and medium businesses, with tens of thousands of advertisers now on the platform and CPC bidding already the majority of campaigns. A platform growing that fast, adding an agentic layer and its first CRM and ecommerce integrations in the same week, is worth a marketer's attention even before Sponsored Agents leaves testing.
For a business leader, the practical shift is in who does the work. Writing ad copy, choosing images, and setting up campaign structure has traditionally required either an agency retainer or a person with the time and skill to do it well. These tools push a meaningful chunk of that first draft onto the AI, with the human still reviewing before anything publishes. The HubSpot and Shopify integrations remove a second kind of cost, the time spent stitching a new ad platform into systems a business already runs its operations through.
What's still unproven is how well any of this performs compared to a professionally managed campaign, and what it means to let an AI agent represent a brand's voice in an open-ended conversation rather than a fixed piece of copy a person signed off on. OpenAI says advertisers remain in control of the suggested creative, but a Sponsored Agent conversation happens in real time, without a review step before each reply. That's a different kind of exposure than approving an ad before it runs.
The question worth sitting with isn't whether the agent can hold a conversation about a dining table. It's whether a business is ready to let something other than a person answer the questions that used to go to whoever actually worked there.