OpenAI’s latest effort to bring businesses into ChatGPT comes after an earlier, more transactional experiment stumbled. The company had tried to make the chatbot an e-commerce destination where users could buy products directly, including through a checkout-cart feature; that commission-based project was retired in March after failing to take off.¹

Now, OpenAI is taking a different route: helping companies shape the information users encounter before any purchase decision is made. In Tuesday’s beta launch, it introduced Businesses in ChatGPT, centered on a Business Hub where eligible firms can claim and verify profiles, update core details, and add product feeds with pricing and availability.²

OpenAI says the scale of the opportunity is considerable, describing the feature as a way for businesses to reach the 1.2 billion people who use ChatGPT each week. Its case is that better, company-supplied data can make product research more accurate and current—not simply turn chat into another ad channel.²

The more ambitious component is the Business Agent. Eligible U.S. e-commerce and online-service companies can build an agent to answer follow-up questions about their offerings. OpenAI says those conversations will be clearly labeled, separate from the user’s original ChatGPT thread and from the model’s independent response; businesses may also sponsor agents as destinations for ChatGPT ads.²

The company is also giving firms limited analytics: mentions, website clicks, profile views and broad discovery themes. But OpenAI draws a hard line around individual chats, saying it does not share user conversations or Business Agent exchanges with businesses, and only provides aggregated results once interaction thresholds are met.²

That architecture makes the launch look less like the abandoned in-chat checkout system and more like a bid to replicate the role Google has long played: the place people go to understand businesses before they buy. Whether ChatGPT can convert that discovery role into a durable commercial ecosystem remains the unanswered question.¹

OpenAI president Greg Brockman distilled the pitch more bluntly: businesses should “claim your business on ChatGPT and engage with customers in new ways.”Greg Brockman (gdb)³