AI Marketing: How Advertising Enters Chatbots
AI marketing It's becoming the dominant business model for leading generative chatbots. Revenue trends clearly show that without advertising, generative AI struggles to sustain its structural costs.
In 2025, despite $20 billion in revenue, OpenAI announced it will begin showing ads to users to increase revenue. Subscriptions alone cannot cover the investments needed for data centers, cloud infrastructure, and, in OpenAI's case, even the production of proprietary chips.
The paradigm is now clear: first you acquire a huge user base, then you collect usage data and finally you activate a targeted advertising system. This logic of AI marketing It is presented as an opportunity for advertisers and brands, who have seen organic traffic to their sites plummet with the advent of chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok.
Advertising, in data-intensive ecosystems, becomes a kind of panacea for turning loyalty into profit. If the money doesn't come directly from end users, it will come from advertisers interested in managing new conversational touchpoints.
AI marketing in chatbots: the emerging economic model
Large generative AI platforms are converging towards a model based on’AI marketing, integrating advertising formats into the conversational experience. The reason is primarily economic: training and maintaining models requires significant capital and infrastructure.
The industry is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in building AI data centers and creating computationally optimized hardware, such as OpenAI's proprietary chips. In this environment, simple premium subscriptions or pay-per-use are not enough to ensure long-term sustainability.
The result is a pattern already seen on the traditional web: initially free or nearly free products, explosive growth of the user base, data extraction, and subsequent monetization through advertising. The difference today is that interactions with chatbots are much more intimate, detailed, and sensitive than a typical web search.
According to analyses and public discussions reported by outlets such as the New York Times and the Guardian, This shift opens up unprecedented opportunities for privacy, transparency, and commercial manipulation. Conversations with language models often involve topics related to health, personal relationships, religious beliefs, and highly emotional aspects.
Advertising built on this type of information archive can be extremely precise, but also potentially invasive. This is where the’AI marketing It is radically different from simple search or display advertising: the context is conversational, personalized and continuous.
Google and Anthropic's Moves Toward AI Advertising
The transition to models of AI marketing It's not just about OpenAI. Google and Anthropic are also moving in this direction, integrating advertising capabilities into their AI ecosystems and presenting them as tools for commerce and branding.
Google has announced the launch of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard designed for the age of agentic shopping. The goal is to cover the entire shopping journey: from product discovery to purchase to post-sales support, orchestrated by intelligent agents.
These features aren't coming out of nowhere: Google has been testing them since 2024, and integrated AI features were available from the PMax advertising dashboard in 2025. Essentially, the logic is to bring together the advertising engine, AI recommendations, and conversational assistants.
Anthropic, for its part, has chosen a more direct and symbolic route, launching an advertising campaign at the Super Bowl with the slogan "Advertising is coming to AI." In one of the ads, a user asks how to get fit quickly, and the AI's response contains an embedded advertisement.
This type of narrative explicitly communicates that the next phase of AI will be deeply intertwined with’AI marketing. Even Sam Altman, quoted by the Guardian, laughed at the ads, though he called them “blatantly dishonest” in the way they simplified the phenomenon.
Risks, opacity, and overly targeted advertising in chatbots
One of the most critical points of the’AI marketing Applied to chatbots, it's transparency. The way these systems work is often described as a "black box": users have no real visibility into how content is filtered, sorted, and enriched with ads.
The prospect of conversations being used to display highly targeted ads raises questions about the reliability of responses. How will a user distinguish between a recommendation generated based on the best available sources and one influenced by an advertiser's budget?
Zoë Hitzig, a PhD economist and researcher who left OpenAI at this very moment, wrote in the New York Times that users tell chatbots about their health concerns, relationship problems, religious beliefs, and ideas about the afterlife. This wealth of information could be used to build advertising capable of manipulating users in ways we currently cannot understand, much less prevent.
In short, the risk is that the’AI marketing Transform chatbots from neutral advisors to advertising channels disguised as assistants. We'll no longer search for products on a search engine: we'll ask chatbots questions and receive responses in which ads and sponsored content are designed to seem like a natural part of the conversation.
For companies, this will require investing in a new channel of visibility, just as traffic from traditional search engines declines due to the centralization of information within AI assistants. For users, however, it will become crucial to understand when responses are truly impartial.
AI Marketing: Impact on Marketing and Business
The affirmation of the’AI marketing Chatbots are reshaping digital marketing and customer communication strategies. Brands will need to shift from a model based on search engine positioning to one centered on presence within AI-assisted conversational flows.
It means designing messages and offers that integrate seamlessly into natural conversations, where the chatbot becomes the mediator between user and brand. The customer journey shifts from the website homepage to the chat window: discovery, comparison, consultation, purchase, and after-sales can all take place in the same conversational space.
For business, the opportunities of the’AI marketing There are many advantages: finer segmentation, highly personalized recommendations, automated responses and follow-ups, and real-time lead qualification. At the same time, they increase responsibilities in terms of ethics, transparency, and data management.
A company that integrates AI into its channels, such as WhatsApp Business or on-site chatbots, can use these tools to create advanced conversational funnels: from initial contact to sales and support. The key is to design the experience so that user value remains central and that the promotional component doesn't undermine trust.
In this framework, conversational automation platforms and AI marketing on messaging channels become strategic to maintain control of the customer experience, avoiding relying exclusively on large generalist chatbots.
How SendApp Can Help with AI Marketing
For companies that want to take advantage of the’AI marketing In a controlled and compliant manner, it's essential to structure a proprietary ecosystem for direct customer communication. SendApp was created precisely for this purpose: to bring automation, artificial intelligence, and messaging into a single, business-focused platform.
With SendApp Official Businesses can use the official WhatsApp Business API to integrate chatbots, automated workflows, and transactional messaging into their CRM, e-commerce, or ERP systems. This allows them to build customizable messaging logic. AI marketing conversational on a channel already familiar to users.
SendApp Agent It allows you to manage conversations with human teams and agents, integrating automatic responses, intelligent message routing, and internal collaboration. This way, the company can combine the efficiency of AI with the sensitivity of human contact, ensuring that the advertising component does not outweigh the quality of the support.
For those who need to climb the’AI marketing at high volumes, SendApp Cloud It offers advanced automation, large-scale campaigns, integrations, and centralized data analysis. You can orchestrate campaigns, follow-up sequences, personalized notifications, and nurturing flows in a coordinated manner across multiple channels.
The combination of official APIs, team management and cloud infrastructure allows companies to create their own AI strategy marketing on WhatsApp and other channels, without being completely dependent on the monetization models of large, general-purpose chatbots. This means more control over data, content, and customer experience.
To start designing a strategy AI marketing effective conversational, companies can request a dedicated consultation and test SendApp, immediately integrating intelligent automations and personalized campaigns into their sales and support processes.
To delve deeper into the technological context of advertising and digital business models, it is also useful to consider the economic underpinnings of platform markets, which are well described in general resources such as Wikipedia on digital platforms, which help frame the role of AI in the new advertising ecosystem.
