Axel Winter

The superapp was supposed to be Asia’s invention: one app for chat, pay, shop, book, live. We built one — the ONESIAM SuperApp — so I know what it takes: years, billions of transactions, and an audience that never leaves.

Now the next superapp isn’t an app you download. It’s a conversation you have.

Starting today, ChatGPT Ads are rolling out across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan. OpenAI’s numbers: $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate in under 200 days, tens of thousands of advertisers, 60+ countries. That’s not a pilot. That’s inventory.

Here’s the mechanics, briefly. Ads sit below a ChatGPT answer — labeled, separate from the answer, visible only on Free and Go plans. No keywords; targeting runs on Context Hints, your description of the conversation your product belongs in. Shopify plugs catalogs straight in; HubSpot syncs the leads. And Sponsored Agents (beta) go one step further: click into a labeled conversation with your brand’s agent, then hand off to checkout.

See the pattern? Search, shopping, and service collapsing into one interface — the exact superapp playbook, except nobody had to download anything. ChatGPT did it from the opposite direction: instead of bolting services onto an app, it bolted an audience onto a conversation.

And let’s name who this is really aimed at. It isn’t Meta or Amazon — it’s Google. Search advertising is still the deepest pool of intent-based ad money there is, and ChatGPT just dug a second pool next to it: one where the “query” is a conversation, not keywords. Every dollar an advertiser moves into Context Hints is a dollar that used to need a keyword bid. Google spent twenty years teaching the world to bid on intent. OpenAI just changed what intent looks like.

My take: this is a new customer-acquisition channel, and the agencies that learn the auction now will own it later. Most companies have tried AI, but few pilots make it into daily operations where the value is — we say this on our own site, and it applies to advertising too. One client, one small budget, learn the formats, learn what converts. Don’t sign up as an agency partner blind. Test the inventory first.

That’s what we’re doing at Pivot Digital. Stop catching up, start rewiring — we’re a Singapore company, qualified for self-service on day one, and our first house campaign went live on day one: one of the first local ads in the region. We’ll report what the auction actually looks like. We’re learning the machinery from the inside, the same way we learned everything else: by operating it, not by writing decks about it. Operator, not observer — that’s the whole firm.

One practical warning: your destination page must reflect the ad’s offer, and it must let OpenAI’s ad crawlers in. Most first campaigns will die on that detail, not on creative.

The chat is the superapp now. The only question is whether you’re inside the conversation or watching it.

Disclosure: I am CEO of Xponential and Pivot Digital, and an independent director of GXBank. Views are my own.

Sources: OpenAI, “ChatGPT Ads expands to Southeast Asia and Taiwan” (Sept 24, 2026); OpenAI Help Center, Ads Manager availability; OpenAI, “Reimagining advertising with AI.” Revenue and advertiser figures are OpenAI’s stated numbers.