Many AI companies will adopt advertising: ad agency Criteo

"Advertising is the business model best suited to being rolled out on a large scale worldwide," said the group's chief executive Michael Komasinski, the group’s chief executive officer, on the sidelines of the Web Summit in Lisbon.

"This made it possible to finance most of the major platforms we all use today, whether it’s Google, Meta, or Snapchat," he added.

Pressure to boost revenue to cover its colossal spending pushed OpenAI to begin testing advertising in ChatGPT in February in the United States for free and low-cost tier subscriptions.

It has subsequently begun to progressively roll out ads worldwide, in cooperation with Criteo.

OpenAI's rival Anthropic, which is set to imminently go public with a stock listing, has said it doesn't plan to integrate advertising in its AI tools due to data protection concerns as well as to protect the interests of its users.

Microsoft has used ads in its public version of Copilot AI since 2023.

Perplexity has experimented with ads in the United States since 2024.

Google is considering integrating ads in Gemini.

Developing AI models and rolling them out requires massive investments.

The rally in AI-related stocks that has buoyed markets this year was testament to investor confidence, but both equity and bond investors have recently grown more wary as inflation and high interest rates are making the endeavour even more expensive.

"I think advertising formats will continue to become more engaging, more innovative, and certainly more integrated into the conversational experience" of AI chatbots, said Komasinski.

Criteo works with OpenAI in 89 countries to develop advertising campaigns on AI chatbots.

Komasinski said some 3,600 brands have trialled AI advertising campaigns and they have noted a modest increase in their spending on ChatGPT.

He remains sceptical about AI agents being able to autonomously make purchases.

"It’s very easy to order trivial things (online) but for very important things you wouldn’t want to delegate that to a robot," Komasinski said.