Companies can now add their own sales chatbot to ChatGPT. Users can open it with one click from an answer, and companies can pay to promote the same chatbot as an ad. The idea is sound. But a chat that speaks for a seller should say so in plain words, every time, and not rely on a small label.
This is a DailyAI analysis. The facts below come from the company’s own pages and from what its executives told the trade press. The opinions in it are ours.
The new tools for businesses
On 10 November, OpenAI opened Businesses in ChatGPT as a beta. Companies can now claim a profile, add product feeds with prices and stock levels, and see how often they come up in conversations. The pitch is reach. ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users, the company says.
The bigger change is the Business Agent. Online shops and online service firms in America can build a chatbot that answers questions about what they sell. When a business appears in an answer, a user can open its profile and start a chat with its agent. That chat is labelled and kept apart from the main conversation. When the shopper is ready to pay, the agent sends them to the seller’s own website.
Brands can also pay to promote the chatbot as an ad. An eligible ad can carry a Start chat button that opens the chatbot, next to a link to the website. Benji Shomair, the company’s vice-president of monetisation, explained the link between the two in a press briefing. “Think of the business agent as the organic experience,” he said. “The sponsored agent is the paid experience, but the agent that sits behind it should be the same,” he added. His comments were reported by a trade magazine for the advertising industry.
What OpenAI got right
Much of the design is careful. Businesses do not see users’ conversations or their chats with a brand’s chatbot. They get grouped themes, and only once enough people have taken part. Shomair also said that claiming a profile does not move a business higher in the answers. In his words, the core product must stay objective, and a business should not be able to change how often it shows up in answers.
Ads are kept apart from the chatbot too. According to the engineers who built it, the ad system runs as its own service, with separate models and separate code from the one that writes answers. Ads appear only for people on the free plan and the low-cost Go plan, below the answer and marked as sponsored. They are already big business. Advertising in ChatGPT passed $1 billion in annualised revenue less than 200 days after launch, and more than 100,000 advertisers have used them.
Where the design falls short
The promise that ads do not sway answers applies only to the chatbot’s own replies. It does not apply to a Business Agent. Each one is built inside ChatGPT from instructions and a product feed that the seller supplies. Shomair said firms cannot bring a chatbot of their own. He described typical use as shoppers weighing up size, colour and price before looking at related purchases. Early tests of the paid version had shown “promising results”, he said, especially in the depth of the conversations.
That is a sales assistant. There is nothing wrong with a sales assistant. But people treat a shop clerk differently from a friend who knows the products, and here both speak in the same app, in the same chat style, a click apart. The company’s own example has a shopper asking a Business Agent about the differences between two options and which features fit their needs. A seller’s chatbot is not the right place to settle that question.
A label at the top of a chat window is easy to miss, especially on a phone. And the people most likely to miss it are the ones who already trust ChatGPT’s answers the most.
Three changes OpenAI should make
The fixes would cost little. First, every Business Agent should begin each chat by stating, in words, that it speaks for the seller and cannot give a neutral comparison with rivals. Second, a paid Business Agent should look different from a free one, so users can see when a brand has paid to reach them. Third, the rules these chatbots must follow on prices, discounts and refunds should sit in one public place that users can find, along with how they are checked.
Shopping through chatbots is growing fast. Earlier this month we looked at a claim about how many searches the chatbot now handles. We have also argued that large stores which block AI shopping agents will not hold out for long.
Why it matters: ChatGPT is becoming a place where people decide what to buy, and sellers can now talk to shoppers there. Users should always be able to tell, at a glance, when they have moved from an independent answer to a sales pitch.
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