Ads Come to the Chatbox

Forbes India covers OpenAI's visual ad format for ChatGPT, tested first in image-generation queries, and the India route: brands advertise through Razorpay Engage, which prepares catalogues, runs campaigns and tracks performance, with Fastrack, Traya, Tata Neu, Rivaah by Tanishq, Shaadi.com, Axis Max Life and Tanishq among the early advertisers named by the piece. Dave Dugan, OpenAI's global head of ads, is the main voice; the daily floor for Indian advertisers is Rs 725.

The piece walks through how the system works, per OpenAI: ads only against the roughly 20 percent of queries with direct commercial intent, only to Free and Go users, buying on CPM first, then CPC, then cost per action, and a Sponsored Agents test where a Learn More button opens a branded conversation. It then sets out OpenAI's three principles: answer independence, conversational privacy and user choice.

Our co-founder and CEO Viren Inaniyan is quoted under answer independence, on the risk brands run in the other direction: treating a paid placement as if the model endorsed them. The article names us as TruCommerce.ai, a startup building infrastructure for agentic commerce discovery and transactions.