OpenAI opens Businesses in ChatGPT with Business Agents

OpenAI has opened a beta called Businesses in ChatGPT, which lets a company take charge of how it appears inside ChatGPT and, if it qualifies, put its own customer-facing agent there (OpenAI's post). The post lists what a business can do after claiming its listing: manage its information, see how people engage with it, and build a Business Agent that answers customers' questions and helps them explore what it offers. OpenAI's announcement page refused automated access, so the details below come from VentureBeat's report, published by VentureBeat on November 10.

Claiming happens in Business Hub inside ChatGPT. A business proves its claim through its phone number, email address, website domain or Shopify account, and the person managing the listing must also pass an identity check with Persona, a verification service, before publishing changes, viewing analytics or creating an agent. The analytics are aggregate figures for the past 28 days: website clicks, mentions of the business in ChatGPT's answers, and recurring topics. According to the report, OpenAI says ChatGPT will keep making independent recommendations and that claiming a profile does not guarantee better placement or sales.

The Business Agent is the bigger change. A shopper can open a brand's profile and start a separate conversation with that brand's agent, labelled so the shopper knows they have left the general assistant. The agent answers from information the business supplies, such as a product feed with prices and stock or a connected Shopify store, under guidelines the business sets. At launch, only eligible US ecommerce and online-service companies with a website can publish one. OpenAI says it does not share users' conversations or Business Agent chats with businesses, so a company sees aggregate metrics rather than transcripts. VentureBeat, citing Digiday, reports that claiming and publishing are free at launch, with later charges not ruled out.

The result is a seller-run storefront inside an assistant that, by OpenAI's count, reaches 1.2 billion people a week. A business gains control over its facts and a way to answer shoppers directly, but by OpenAI's account the claim itself does not move it up in ChatGPT's recommendations. The video attached to the post was not transcribed.