ChatGPT Adds Verified Business Agents for In-Chat Shopping

What are ChatGPT Business Agents?

They're verified representatives of a brand that users can talk to without leaving ChatGPT.

OpenAI calls them Business Agents: official, verified profiles that companies can set up through a new Business Hub. When ChatGPT mentions a business in a reply, it can include a clickable link that opens a chat with that company's agent. The agent can share product details, contact info, and current offers.

The idea is to keep shoppers inside ChatGPT instead of bouncing them to a separate website. OpenAI says the feature will help people compare products from the same provider and discover new brands they might have missed.

For now, the rollout is limited to eligible ecommerce and online service companies in the US. Existing OpenAI Enterprise customers and advertisers can claim their business, and Shopify merchants can connect their store from the Business Hub or Shopify admin to speed up verification. This follows OpenAI's broader push into agentic tools, much like the Claude Code privacy leak showed how AI assistants are getting deeper into everyday workflows.

Privacy and sponsored placements

OpenAI says individual chats with Business Agents won't be shared with companies; insights are aggregated and thresholded.

Businesses will get a dashboard showing how often they're mentioned and how many clicks they get, but they won't see the actual conversations. OpenAI says insights are only available when enough interactions meet certain thresholds, so a single chat can't be traced back to a person.

Companies can also sponsor their Business Agent to appear more prominently in ChatGPT Ads. OpenAI stresses that sponsored placements are clearly labeled and kept separate from organic ChatGPT responses. That distinction matters: if users can't tell an ad from an answer, trust in the whole system erodes.

The bigger picture: agentic commerce

This is OpenAI's first serious move to bring transactions and brand conversations into ChatGPT itself.

ChatGPT already helps people research products, but until now it mostly pointed them elsewhere to buy. Business Agents change that by making the chatbot a place where businesses can interact directly with customers. It's a small step, but it points toward a future where AI assistants handle more of the shopping journey, from discovery to checkout.

The move puts OpenAI in more direct competition with Google's shopping tools and with platforms like Shopify that are building their own AI-powered commerce features. For businesses, the appeal is access to ChatGPT's massive user base; for OpenAI, it's a new revenue stream beyond subscriptions and API usage.

The catch? Success depends on execution. If Business Agents feel like pushy sales bots, users will ignore them. If they're genuinely helpful, they could become a default way to get answers about products and services. As with any AI agent, the line between assistance and overreach is thin, as seen in cases like the OpenAI lawsuit over ChatGPT's role in a poisoning plot.

Availability and pricing

Business Agents are initially available only to eligible ecommerce and online service companies in the US. OpenAI hasn't announced a timeline for expanding to the UK or EU. Pricing for businesses hasn't been disclosed, but sponsored placements will likely be part of OpenAI's ad offerings.

For shoppers in the US, the feature will appear gradually as businesses claim their profiles. UK and EU users will have to wait for an official rollout.

Business Agents are a small but telling step toward a ChatGPT that doesn't just answer questions but closes deals. For now, it's a US-only experiment with clear guardrails. How OpenAI balances helpfulness with monetization will decide whether this becomes a core part of the shopping experience or just another feature users skip.