“Many AI platforms will end up adopting advertising”: the boss of the French online advertising giant Criteo is convinced that ads will arrive in our discussions with ChatGPT

“Many artificial intelligence platforms will end up adopting advertising,” the head of the French online advertising group Criteo told AFP on Tuesday, at a time when the profitability of AI companies is being questioned more than ever. “Advertising is the economic model most likely to be deployed on a large scale in the world,” continued Michael Komasinski, general director of the group, met on the sidelines of the Web Summit in Lisbon. “It helped fund most of the big platforms that we all use today, whether it's Google, Meta, Snapchat,” he added.

Under pressure to make its colossal expenses profitable, OpenAI began testing advertising in ChatGPT in the United States in February, for its free and low-cost offers, before a gradual global deployment, in partnership with Criteo in particular. Europe saw the arrival of advertisements on ChatGPT from August. Its rival Anthropic, which is due to go public soon, has assured it that it will not integrate advertisements into its AI tools, in the name of data security and the interests of users.

Ads integrated into the conversation Beyond OpenAI, Microsoft has already been offering sponsored content on its AI assistant Copilot for the general public since 2023. Perplexity, a search engine powered by AI, has been experimenting with it since 2024 in the United States and Google is considering its integration into Gemini. Companies developing AI models face very significant costs, and advertising appears to be a lever to generate revenue at a time when investors seem to fear a potential slowdown in the pace of development of the sector.

“I think advertising formats will continue to become more interesting, more innovative, and certainly more integrated into the conversational experience,” detailed Michael Komasinski, who collaborates with OpenAI in 89 countries to develop advertising campaigns on this channel. According to the manager, 3,600 brands have tested campaigns in this context and he says he has observed "a modest increase" in his clients' budgets on ChatGPT since the launch of this offer.

However, Michael Komasinski says he is “skeptical” about the development of AI agents capable of carrying out purchasing acts completely on their own. “It's very easy to order small things (online) and for very important things, you wouldn't want to delegate it to a robot,” he says.

Machine-translated from French