All Brands Can Now Monetise Consumer Interest with GPTs

Photo credit: Steve Johnson via Unsplash

OpenAI’s ‘GPT Builder’ lets anyone with a premium account create a mini version of ChatGPT that’s customised to the user’s own choice of knowledge and instructions, tailoring the capabilities to whatever they want. These custom bots are called ‘GPTs’ and are available for any other premium subscriber to use via something akin to an app store. OpenAI shares subscription revenue with creators based on how much their GPT is used.

Among other things, GPTs are excellent complements to websites and other marketing collateral that contain key information about products. In addition, they have several excellent advantages:

· They can talk back and answer bespoke questions.

· They bypass other major channels used by potential customers, like searches that contain competitor ads or distractions.

· They generate revenue.

I’ll say that again: they generate revenue. OpenAI will pay you when people are researching your products.

All brands should be jumping on this now: get QR code stickers onto products in retail; add links to web pages to send people to your GPT, and equip salespeople with the GPT on their devices.

Get increased conversion rates, reduce customer exposure to competitors and earn revenue from OpenAI. Merry Christmas.

Of course, there are small details to work out. GPTs are only available to premium ChatGPT users who pay $20 per month to use it. We don’t know how many of the 100m active users that is but they probably skew slightly towards higher earners. As such, the first products that are ideal for GPTs are the bigger ticket items like tech goods, home appliances, cars and so on.

The principle can expand further by using the OpenAI API, letting brands build custom versions, adding more functionality, avatars and so on. The revenue share element won’t apply there and it will cost to run the bot, but the scale and experience for users increases dramatically and there’s added security if you need it.

Accuracy is still an issue for the larger, more complicated products/GPTs but there are numerous methods to mitigate it and with the right disclaimers, there’s no reason to let that stop progress.

Scaling to hundreds or thousands of products and variants is a challenge, and that needs processes to be created and integrated with existing systems to control costs and quality.

The challenges are nothing compared to the opportunity however, and the sooner you start, the faster the benefits begin to accrue.

As you may have assumed, we’re already building these for clients and handling the details. Get in touch if you want to know more or get help with rolling them out.