ChatGPT Verified Business Agents Enable Brand Comparison

OpenAI is opening up ChatGPT to a new kind of conversation partner: the companies themselves. Starting today, the chatbot will let certain US e-commerce and online service businesses deploy verified "Business Agents," AI representatives that can field questions about products, pricing, and how one item stacks up against another. OpenAI's VP of monetization, Benji Shomair, laid out the plan in a press briefing, part of a broader set of business-focused tools rolling out in beta.

The setup works like this: if a business with a registered agent shows up in a ChatGPT response, users get the option to start chatting directly with that agent instead of just getting a generic answer. Businesses write their own agent instructions and feed in the context they want the AI to draw on, which means the responses are shaped by the company, not scraped from the open web. OpenAI says these conversations will be clearly marked and kept separate from a user's regular ChatGPT chat history, so there's no confusion about who's actually talking.

Verification runs through a new feature called Business Hub, which is also where companies will get a look at how often they come up in ChatGPT conversations.