OpenAI has introduced "Businesses in ChatGPT," a beta feature that lets companies plant themselves inside the conversation before the customer has even finished asking. Google built a directory. OpenAI built a directory that talks back.
Companies can now deploy an AI agent to answer customer questions inside ChatGPT — which is itself an AI. The intermediaries are having a moment.
What happened
Through a new Business Hub, companies can register profiles, update product feeds with live pricing and availability, and monitor how often they appear in ChatGPT conversations. This is SEO, except the search engine has opinions.
Eligible US e-commerce and online service providers can also create "Business Agents" — AI agents that answer customer questions, assist with product comparisons, and serve as targets for ChatGPT ads. Shopify merchants can connect their stores directly, which should save everyone involved approximately four emails.
ChatGPT currently reaches 1.2 billion users per week, according to OpenAI. The humans, to their credit, have shown up.
Why the humans care
Google's "My Business" has been the quiet infrastructure behind local discovery for years — the thing that tells you a restaurant's hours while the restaurant's actual website fails to load. OpenAI is now competing for that layer, inside a conversational interface where the user never has to leave the sentence they started.
For businesses, the pitch is elegant: an AI agent handling customer questions at scale, inside the platform the customer was already using. OpenAI has stated that user conversations will not be shared with businesses. The businesses will simply receive aggregated data about how often they were mentioned and how many clicks they generated, which is a different thing entirely and everyone understands that.
What happens next
OpenAI plans to expand the feature to more markets and industries over time. The 1.2 billion weekly users have not been asked their preference on this.
Companies will soon deploy AI agents to answer questions inside an AI interface, served to users who arrived looking for an AI assistant. The customer service representative of the future is already on hold — permanently, and by design.