AI platforms will turn to ads, Criteo CEO says

Many AI platforms will eventually adopt advertising as they look for revenue to support costly services, Criteo chief executive Michael Komasinski said Tuesday at the Web Summit in Lisbon.

Komasinski said advertising was the business model best suited to large-scale global rollout, pointing to Google, Meta and Snapchat as platforms financed by ads.

OpenAI began testing advertising in ChatGPT in February in the United States for free and low-cost subscriptions and has since started a wider rollout with Criteo. Microsoft has used ads in the public version of Copilot AI since 2023, Perplexity has experimented with ads in the United States since 2024, and Google is considering integrating ads in Gemini.

Anthropic has said it does not plan to integrate advertising into its AI tools, citing data protection concerns and user interests.

Komasinski said advertising formats in AI chatbots would become more integrated into conversational experiences. He said Criteo works with OpenAI in 89 countries and that about 3,600 brands have trialled AI advertising campaigns, with a modest increase in spending on ChatGPT.

He said he remained sceptical about AI agents making purchases autonomously, saying users may not want to delegate important purchases to a robot.