By David Doty
One might well wonder if, at this point, OpenAI is less a company than an ongoing marketing event with UFC type muscle. Brawn and attention-grabbing knock-out power accompany billion-dollar—scratch that, trillion-dollar–valuations, existential safety dilemmas, AI porn debacles, copyright lawsuits, corporate coups and sudden product launches. And that’s just before lunch. The sheer strength is amazing to behold, and the pace is, if you will, breakneck. The stakes? Enormous. And the unsetting weight throwing feels intentional, structural rather than accidental.
Let’s start with the numbers, because though we have heard them, they sound made up. ChatGPT, just three years old, is one of the fastest-adopted consumer products in history, with 800 million monthly active users (as of this writing), $20 billion in annual recurring revenue and an ever-expanding role in how people write, code, search, study, shop and work. It has challenged successfully many of the former digital leading players, bursting into the fight cage of digital advertising and marketing like a strutting young bully able to put up its dukes against the older incumbents in search, and in the search for ad revenue though that has been more whisper than self-proclaimed goal… for the moment.
OpenAI has burned through staggering amounts of cash to train ever-larger models, and raised capital at valuations that would have sounded like satire even a few years ago ($830 billion to $1 trillion?! WTF). Each product release lands like a macroeconomic head spinning punch, disrupting any players and any business processes that existed before its arrival. Each model update ripples across media and markets.
On top of it all is the enormous, unprecedented scale in audience shift in loyalty, time and attention from older digital participants to the new world order of ChatGPT (as well as a sprinkling of other AI platforms). Consumers aren’t just ready to be engaged, and occasionally bewildered, by AI-driven interactions, they are deep down the rabbit hole and adopting the possibilities with vigor.
Then there’s the ambition. OpenAI isn’t just a frontier research lab with a chat interface. Hiring Fidji Simo to help build an application ecosystem signaled a clear shift toward platform-competitive thinking with plugins, agents, custom GPTs, enterprise tooling and a growing sense that ChatGPT is a layer that all companies are expected to build on.
The timeline? All the foregoing has happened on a product that wasn’t even launched until November 2022—a reminder of just how compressed the AI timeline really is.
The kicker? The rest of us in digital advertising can’t ignore OpenAI even if we wanted to, as regulators in the US and Europe seem happy to do as they once again stay determinedly focused on where the puck once was. Campaigns, content operations, creative teams and customer experience are now operating in an AI-accelerated landscape. One week, AI promises unprecedented personalization and hyper-scaled content. The next, it surfaces compliance or brand safety challenges no one could have anticipated.
Where Marketers Need to Focus
To be clear, this is not to say we should root for any harm to come to OpenAI. Quite the opposite. An increasing share of the U.S. economy and our collective 401ks now depend on OpenAI’s momentum. But it’s hard to ignore how brutally we’re all being wrenched by its news cycles. One week AI will eliminate half of all jobs (a white collar bloodbath); the next—Oops, just kidding!—it will merely augment them.
This is where a WeWork analogy becomes useful (remember that boondoggle?). Not because OpenAI is a vanity real estate play or because its technology is a sham (it plainly isn’t), but because WeWork embodied a particular Silicon Valley hubris confusing scale with inevitability and visionary language with immunity from reality. WeWork CEO Adam Neumann didn’t fail because offices weren’t useful. He failed because his story ran faster than the fundamentals could support.
OpenAI may not be there yet or ever, but it flirts with the same risks. Its governance structure remains unusually complex for a company of its size and scale. The economics of ever-larger models are still unsettled (just to drive home the point, OpenAI has committed $1.4 trillion to data infrastructure projects over the next 8 years, more than the current value of the company). All the while, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s tone oscillates between sober warnings about existential risk and breezy assurances that this is all fine. Again, hubris doesn’t necessarily mean being wrong. It does imply, as we have seen in Silicon Valley before, blithely assuming you are the Chosen One.
For marketers, that’s a warning. Hype can drive engagement, but it can’t fix governance, trust or execution. Brands that adopt AI without a tight, explicit strategy may look cutting-edge on day one and like amateurs on day 100.
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Meaning for the Year Ahead
So, what does all this insanity tell us about the year ahead?
- The biggest risk is AI normalization. AI already feels less magical and more like electricity. When everything is “AI-powered,” differentiation shifts from wonder to reliability, cost and trust. The transition is brutal for companies whose valuations are fueled by momentum rather than margins and tends to favor the OG infrastructure players, not the loudest storytellers. That’s why Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was willing recently to spend $2 billion on the little-known Chinese AI agent startup Manus. Differentiation will come from execution, integration and reliability, not novelty. Brands that lean on momentum alone will be seen as noisy rather than innovative.
- Job disruptions could well be messier than headlines suggest. The stories about mass job elimination have been eye-catching, but reality will be more likely focused on quasi automation and wage pressure. In advertising particularly, AI may speed production, but so far few are those who have mastered leveraging it for restructuring creativity.
- The platform era will fragment before it consolidates. Despite OpenAI’s push to become the default layer, everyone is hedging aggressively. Multimodel strategies, open-source fallbacks and regulatory constraints will prevent any single company from cleanly owning the entire stack. Could this year look more like the early cloud wars than iOS lock in?
- Safety debates will shift from apocalypse to accountability and solutions. This year we’ll all argue less about whether AI will wipe out humanity and instead worry about the clear and present danger of how AI is quietly reshaping hiring, credit, healthcare and overall business ethics. And we’ll push on the positive potential, too–how AI can automate safety solutions. That’s a much more complex conversation, and one that won’t be addressed by white papers and blog posts alone. Conversations will be in person and in debate as much as in collaborations. Technology might well become the way to fix safety issues at scale. Marketing leaders will need to navigate AI content, personalization and interactions with radical transparency.
- Whatever happens, OpenAI will define our reality even if it doesn’t dominate it. History can be unkind to pioneers but tends to be generous to their influence. Even if OpenAI eventually cedes ground to competitors or economics, it has already set basic terms for the AI era.
OpenAI is an iconic company, and it is undeniably changing how the world communicates, creates and buys. And let’s be honest, it’s also completely bonkers. It may well end up proving an old dot-com adage: You can tell who the pioneers are by the arrows sticking out of their backs. But regardless of whether OpenAI becomes an enduring operating system of the AI age or an early cautionary tale, the rest of us will be living with the opportunities, the risks and, yes, the insanity, for a very long time. Welcome to 2026!
Feature image credit: NurPhoto via Getty Images
By David Doty
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