A closer look at OpenAI’s ads manager – and how much work it still needs

Digital Marketing Redux // April 16, 2026 A closer look at OpenAI’s ads manager – and how much work it still needs By Krystal Scanlon and Seb Joseph Ivy Liu This story was first published by Modern Retail sibling Digiday. OpenAI has an ads manager.

It’s in testing and may not launch in lockstep with the ad business itself — something the company has been at pains to stress to partners. But that’s not really the point. The point is that it exists. Which is historically unusual. This kind of ad tech tends to arrive well into the life of an ad business, not at the start of one.

Meta, Twitter and Snapchat all followed the same arc: ads first, self-serve managers years later, once demand had been proven. The one exception was Google, where Adwords and its self-serve manager launched together in 2000. It went on to become one of the most profitable ad businesses ever built.

OpenAI’s execs have clearly taken notes because the upside is hard to ignore. An ads manager turns an ad business from a series of direct deals into a self-serve marketplace — one where advertisers set budgets, target audiences and measure results without a salesperson in the room. That’s what it did for Google.

The question is whether OpenAI can make the same case. For now, at least, it looks the part. The ads manager bears a passing resemblance to Google’s own, according to a video of the dashboard that Digiday reviewed. Whether the functionality follows is another matter.

As it stands, advertisers can only pay per impression, meaning they’re charged each time an ad is shown, regardless of whether anyone clicks. Cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition options — the models most online advertisers actually rely on — are listed as “coming soon.”

Until they arrive, advertising in ChatGPT remains largely off-limits to performance advertisers, who make up the bulk of the industry. Targeting is equally basic: advertisers can feed in keywords or free-text hints and restrict by country, but there are no demographic targeting or audience buying tools.

Reporting is thin too — it stretches only to impression and click graphs. There’s no audience size estimates or optimization tools. That’s the product today. Behind the scenes, it looks different. The platform is being updated daily, according to an ad exec who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A/B testing infrastructure is in place, feature flags mean different advertisers see different versions of the product, and recent additions include bulk upload support and onboarding screens for new advertisers. “Building an ads manager isn’t just a UI problem,” said Shirley Marschall, an ad tech consultant.

“You’re dealing with real-time bidding logic, measurement, attribution, fraud prevention and more. Getting all of that to work reliably at scale is non-trivial. Which makes the irony hard to miss: this might be one of the few products that’s simply too complex to vibe-code.” Little wonder OpenAI has yet to commit to a hard launch.

Managing ad tech at scale means assembling a lot of moving parts simultaneously — and some of the most critical are still missing. User profile-building for targeting, conversion tracking, advance reporting and analytics — none of it is in place yet. But OpenAI has made clear to partners, even at this early stage, that the ads manager isn’t peripheral.

Without it, there’s no ads business. And without that, the path to profitability looks considerably harder. “They’re doing things backwards, and they’re doing things in hopes to accelerate the adoption of their advertising, especially among smaller advertisers,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, independent e-commerce and AI analyst and advisor.

What’s remarkable is how quickly that urgency materialized. As recently as 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was publicly dismissive of advertising as a revenue model. Three years later, the company has a dedicated ads team, trading deals with agencies and a self-serve manager in testing. From disdain to infrastructure in under three years.

“OpenAI is launching its ads manager early because advertising is now an urgent necessity to fund its massive compute costs and growth,” said Karsten Weide, principal and chief analyst at W Media Research. The numbers make that plain. Last year, OpenAI burned through $8 billion in cash.

This year that figure is projected to hit $25 billion, rising to $57 billion the year after. The losses are expected to continue until 2030 when the company projects it will turn cash flow positive, generating $40 billion in free cash. Advertising is central to that turnaround.

OpenAI’s own projections put it at 36% of total revenue by then, or $102 billion of projected $300 billion total. “OpenAI can’t reach $100 billion in annual advertising revenue unless it serves the SMB market, and doing so requires self-serve capabilities,