OpenAI has launched Businesses in ChatGPT in beta, a new set of tools that lets companies claim a verified profile inside the chatbot and talk to customers through AI agents that represent their brand. The rollout, announced on Tuesday, November 10, marks the company’s biggest step yet toward turning ChatGPT from a place where people research products into a place where businesses can meet them directly.

The launch has two parts. Business Hub is a self-service dashboard where a company can claim its business in ChatGPT, get verified, and manage how it appears. Business Agents are chat agents that speak for a business inside ChatGPT, answering questions about its products and services. The agents are available from today for eligible e-commerce and online service businesses in the United States, with more categories and countries to follow, according to Adweek.

ChatGPT's interface, where Business Agents will appear when a business shows up in an answer. Image: OpenAI
ChatGPT’s interface, where Business Agents will appear when a business shows up in an answer. Image: OpenAI

What Business Hub Does

Until now, a business had almost no control over how ChatGPT described it. Business Hub changes that. Once verified, a company can update its key details and add product feeds that include pricing and availability, Reuters reported. It also gives brands their first real data on how they show up in ChatGPT, including how often the chatbot mentions them, how many people view their profile, and how many click through to their website.

That data comes with limits. OpenAI said it does not share users’ conversations or Business Agent chats with businesses, and insights appear only in aggregate form once interactions pass certain volume thresholds, so individual users stay private. The company is also not disclosing product-level metrics, and brands still cannot control how often they are recommended inside the core ChatGPT experience, which OpenAI said maintains its objectivity.

Onboarding depends on the kind of business. Existing OpenAI Enterprise customers and advertisers can work with their OpenAI representative to claim a profile, while Shopify merchants can connect their stores through Business Hub or the Shopify admin, according to Reuters.

How Business Agents Work

A Business Agent appears when a business that has created one shows up in a ChatGPT response. People see a “start chat” button and can open a conversation with the agent, for example to compare two options or ask which features fit their needs. The chats are clearly labeled and kept separate from the main ChatGPT conversation, so users always know they are talking to an agent that represents the business rather than to ChatGPT itself.

To build an agent, a brand supplies its product feeds and guidance on how the agent should behave. ChatGPT Business Agents are free, and they are separate from Sponsored Agents, a paid product OpenAI is testing that lets people start a conversation with a business-sponsored agent after clicking an ad in ChatGPT. Businesses can also sponsor their Business Agent and use it as the destination for ChatGPT Ads, with sponsored placements clearly labeled.

“We’ve heard lots of feedback from the market about the desire to give information to ChatGPT to influence how a business shows up more accurately and to better support consumers in their customer journey,” Benji Shomair, OpenAI’s vice president of monetization, said in a briefing with reporters. “Today’s announcement is an early step in bringing businesses more deeply into ChatGPT,” OpenAI said in its blog post.

OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT in beta on November 10. Image: OpenAI
OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT in beta on November 10. Image: OpenAI

Why It Matters

The launch lands as ChatGPT becomes a major discovery channel. OpenAI said this week that more than 1 million business customers now pay to use its platform, and that ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly users. OpenAI is also building out an advertising platform around that audience: it is testing Sponsored Agents with select advertisers in the United States, and it recently integrated ChatGPT Ads into HubSpot and Shopify as its first CRM and e-commerce partners.

For brands, Business Hub is the first official answer to a question that has spawned a whole cottage industry of startups promising to measure how companies appear in AI answers. OpenAI’s own tool now supplies that data directly, and companies that feed it accurate information may show up in more of the right places, Shomair said. For shoppers, the change means product questions can be answered by the seller itself, inside the same conversation where the product was recommended.

The move also sharpens competition with Google and Anthropic, which have been racing to put their own AI assistants into shopping and workplace workflows. OpenAI’s advantage is distribution: with hundreds of millions of weekly users already asking ChatGPT what to buy, a verified business presence there is hard for a retailer to ignore.

Sources