OpenAI is making its first appearance at the Cannes Lions advertising conference, where it is pitching marketers on a new advertising business built around ChatGPT, according to the Financial Times.
The company is also presenting Codex, its coding tool, to the same audience of advertisers. According to the Financial Times, the moves are part of an effort to build a multibillion-dollar business as OpenAI heads toward an initial public offering.
The context matters: the Financial Times describes OpenAI as a lossmaking AI group, and this is the first time it has presented at the Cannes Lions advertising conference. Techmeme, summarizing the same Financial Times reporting, frames the debut as OpenAI trying to stand up a serious revenue line ahead of going public.
Advertising has long been the financial engine behind consumer internet giants, and a pitch at Cannes Lions — one of the industry's signature gatherings — signals that OpenAI wants a place in that market. For a company that has so far been known mainly for its chatbot and AI models rather than for selling ads, courting marketers represents a notable shift in how it plans to make money.
The details of how ads would appear inside ChatGPT, and what advertisers were offered, are not specified in the available source material beyond the pitch itself.
Why it matters: if OpenAI can turn its hugely popular ChatGPT into an advertising platform, it could reshape how AI companies fund themselves — and add a new, ad-supported dimension to a product millions of people already use, all while the company prepares to ask public investors to buy in.