Over the weekend the Financial Times came out with a report on OpenAI’s latest pivot. According to a senior OpenAI executive quoted in the piece, the company has decided that “chat is dead.”
Instead, company executives insist, the future lies in a “super app,” an agent (from OpenAI, naturally) that will do everything for us. The “surface” – the interface between a user and OpenAI’s service – will no longer be a fixed chat box. Instead, according to Thibault Sottiaux, who now heads the OpenAI super app project, “what we’re building towards is where you have your own personal agent that is capable of helping you . . . across everything in your life, be it personally or at work.”
“Probably there will be a single entity that I can talk to that can do whatever I need,” added another OpenAI exec who was quoted in the piece.
Let’s think about that for a second. In OpenAI’s new vision for the future, the core experience that catapulted OpenAI to a billion users and a near-trillion-dollar valuation is dead. It’ll be replaced by a personal agent that will leverage OpenAI’s Codex tool to “automatically understand users’ intentions” and take action on their behalf.
Um….now wait just a minute here. Wasn’t it was just two months ago that OpenAI claimed it would surpass $100 billion in advertising revenue, largely by inserting ads into that now defunct chatbot “surface”?
If I were a marketer trying to figure out whether to commit a portion of my spend to OpenAI, I’d have a few questions right about now. How are the ads going to work in this new agent-driven future? What will they look like? Is advertising even appropriate inside an agentic interface where the primary interaction is the spoken word?
None of these questions were raised in the FT’s piece on OpenAI’s pivot, nor are they addressed in coverage from the tech-insider publication The Information. But as I’ve argued over and over, I find it hard to believe that any of us want to live in a world where our “personal agents” are influenced by the incentive structures inherent to a scaled digital advertising ecosystem.
Digital advertising is built on personal data, and AI has access to some of the richest and most sensitive data in the history of the digital revolution. Journal entries, financial data, outpatient visit summaries – we’ve all uploaded these kinds of documents into AI and asked for insights and next steps. Do we want an advertising system analyzing our most intimate moments and then influencing the answers it might give us as a result?
I’m betting that we’d much rather pay a subscription fee that ensures our agents are working only for us, and not whoever pays OpenAI the most to access whatever we might whisper into an agentic interface. And if a subscription model wins over an advertising model – then the question must be asked: What’s the future of OpenAI’s $100 billion advertising business?
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