When Open AI announced plans to develop their ad business back in May, the industry had mixed feelings. On one hand, there was fear: the concern that advertising might interfere with user adoption of new technology. On the other hand, there was excitement: this announcement could mark the beginning of a truly sci-fi era.
Think of the possibilities for a moment. OpenAI isn’t building another screen—it’s creating an AI companion: a pocket- or desk-sized device designed to assist users contextually, in real time, without pulling them into an app or browser. This changes everything.
We’re entering a post-screen world. One where ChatGPT, embedded in a new class of physical interfaces, acts as an intent interpreter—surfacing brand actions powered by affiliate or commerce data at the precise moment of need. These aren’t banners. This isn’t interruption. This is Experience-Driven Monetization.
If done right, consumers will welcome this shift, but only if ads help rather than hinder. These ads will have to be AI-native to function effectively. They need to be subtle and seamlessly integrated. If they don’t help, they simply won’t work.
Imagine this: you’re prepping dinner and ask your device for a quick recipe. The AI suggests one and seamlessly includes a specific brand of spice or sauce. The recipe is the ad, but it doesn’t feel like one. It enhances your experience rather than interrupts it.
This is the future of advertising. Not more ads, not louder ads, just better ads—ones that feel almost invisible, genuinely useful, smart and subtle. But building this kind of embedded utility is no small task. It’s not just a technical challenge, but a cultural, legal, and creative one.
Personalization in this world will become hyper-localized—both physically and semantically. Advertising will need to function block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, even room by room. A user walking down Prince Street in SoHo may get a very different brand suggestion than someone just two blocks east. Factors like foot traffic patterns, time of day, nearby retail inventory, and prior behavior all come into play.
Because devices will operate on a running dialogue between the user and the assistant, advertising signals will be shaped not just by static targeting parameters, but by live, contextual interpretation. Is the user in a hurry? Are they cooking, commuting, decompressing, or caregiving? What have they asked the model in the last 30 minutes or the last 30 days?
These signals become part of a personal semantic graph, continuously updated and used to determine what kind of brand intervention would feel welcome or unwelcome, in the moment. For advertisers, this means rethinking their inputs entirely: things like brand tone, utility relevance, emotional temperature, inventory proximity, even ambient cues like noise level or motion could all factor into whether your product gets surfaced. In this world, ads aren’t placed, they’re inferred.
In a world of ambient AI, physical environments like stores and events will start generating a new form of real-time, hyper-contextual PII—far beyond what cookies ever offered. Instead of tracking clicks or sessions, this new layer captures where you are in a space, what you’re near, how long you linger, the ambient noise around you, your emotional tone, even your gait or group size. It’s not just who you are—it’s what you’re doing, feeling, and needing in that exact moment.
This behavioral and spatial metadata will shape brand recommendations on the fly, making the web cookie look like a blunt instrument by comparison. In this new paradigm, your presence becomes the signal—supercharged by your previous interactions with LLMs.
Creatively, the bar is rising. Reels and TikToks have conditioned consumers to expect content in under 10 seconds. But with ambient, AI-powered interactions, the window is smaller still. Brands will have to find ways to tell their story in two seconds or less through utility, not overt messaging.
But with subtlety comes risk, especially when it comes to brand safety. In an ambient computing world, every AI-generated suggestion is a brand touchpoint, whether the brand intended it or not. Large language models will make real-time recommendations based on available data, inferred sentiment, and contextual signals. That means brands can be included or excluded without direct control.
Your presence in these moments depends less on media buying and more on how the AI perceives it. Are you trustworthy? Helpful? Aligned with user needs? If yes, it gets surfaced. If not, it gets skipped—or worse, misrepresented.
This means that, to stay in control, brands will need to actively shape their AI footprint: ensuring messaging is consistent, content is context-aware, and values are clearly expressed across channels. In this new landscape, brand management isn’t just about reputation—it’s about readability to the model.
The opportunity here is vast. But for OpenAI and others to succeed, they’ll need to build an ad layer that enhances experience, not just extracts value. If they get it right, this won’t feel like advertising at all. It’ll feel like assistance.
