Many artificial intelligence (AI) platforms will over time choose the advertising revenue model. That is the view of Michael Komasinski, chief executive officer of the online advertising agency Criteo. He said this to the AFP news agency at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon.
"I believe that many AI platforms will over time find their way to advertising models," AFP quoted him as saying. According to Komasinski, advertising is the most scalable business model in the world. It, he added, paid for most of the large platforms people use today, whether Google, Meta or Snapchat.
Advertising formats, he said, will become more interesting and fit ever more naturally into the conversational experience of interacting with chatbots.
Pressure to increase revenue and cover enormous costs pushed OpenAI in February to begin testing advertising in ChatGPT in the United States for the free and low-cost subscription tiers. The company then began gradually rolling out advertising worldwide in partnership with Criteo.
OpenAI's competitor Anthropic, which is preparing to hold an initial public offering (IPO, that is, a stock market listing) in the near future, has said it does not plan to build advertising into its AI tools. The reasons are concerns about data protection and a desire to respect users' interests.
Microsoft has used advertising in the public version of its AI assistant Copilot since 2023. Perplexity has been experimenting with advertising in the United States since 2024. Google is considering the possibility of integrating advertising into Gemini.
Developing and launching AI models requires enormous investment. The rise in AI-related stocks that supported the markets this year was evidence of investor confidence. However, recently both shareholders and bondholders have become more cautious: inflation and high interest rates are making this endeavor even more expensive.
Criteo works with OpenAI in 89 countries, developing advertising campaigns for AI chatbots. Komasinski said that about 3,600 brands have tried AI advertising campaigns and noted a moderate increase in their spending on ChatGPT.
At the same time, he is skeptical that AI agents (programs capable of performing tasks independently) will be able to make purchases autonomously. "In fact, it is very easy to order unimportant things, but as a rule you will not entrust important matters to a bot," he explained.