Asad Awan, who is in charge of monetization at OpenAI was interviewed by his own company on “The Thinking Behind Ads in ChatGPT.” It is a 25 minute interview and one part he discusses how he would like to see advertisers simply prompt to create ads and ad campaigns and not have to hire an agency or “performance marketers” to run ads on ChatGPT.
Asad said at about 21 minutes in:
I do think the vision has to be where almost as easy as you were prompting nowadays for questions. You could say my goal is sell these shoes more in Midwest and go, And then it comes back. It’s like hey I tried some experiments and I think this is the right bid given your price point. This is the right way to doing that. Do you want to spend more money on this? And then you continue that conversation and almost become an agent for that.
He goes on to discuss the traditional method:
But today literally a small business has to hire performance marketers which could be one of the biggest costs in some sense actually like you know just that cost of running ads through through that is actually one of the biggest costs in there. Which of course then makes things more expensive. So I think the vision would be that it is as easy as just steering and telling what you need from your business. So describing the what but not having to think about how it will work and how many campaigns and how much dollars and everything else is like hey I want to spend this much I want to grow my business this much these are the constraints and ads are created and run to match your constraints in some sense.
He was then asked about the next steps on how do ads even work 10 years from now? He said at about 24 minutes in:
I think a next step would be more actual conversational ads where you could truly kind of understand what this product is about. The next version would be can it work behind the scenes and actually aggregate the best discounts and best deals and the best version of the product. Like for example, if I know that I like ramen and let’s say some somehow ChatGPT has understood that preference of mine, then it could find that for me. I didn’t even know that that product exists. Then in behind the scenes, it could actually say, “Oh, actually I found this vegan ramen. Maybe that’s something that’s valuable.” And of course, uh there is a marketplace where somebody could say, “Hey, help people who are like this to discover because discovery goes from both directions, right? like of course I’m searching for something and then people want me to discover something and there’s a match between those. SoI think it will be more agentic but in the future but at least the current modalities I think we start from there improve it and make it relevant make it controllable understandable trustworthy and as I think the systems evolve the native the organic products evolve this will evolve as well with that.
Here is the video embed:
Hat tip to Glenn Gabe for pulling this out but of course, not all marketing agencies agree with this:
Lol will work perfectly im sure!!!! LOL No chance that the ai tells the advertiser that the pre opted in settings are best for this! And they actually are not but are designed to drain their ad budget. That would NEVER happen! All big tech companies can be trusted entirely end to…
— Anthony Higman (@AnthonyHigman) February 11, 2026
Forum discussion at X.
