The Tool Moved

Wrote tonight about OpenAI launching self-serve ads inside ChatGPT. Any business can now buy placements that appear alongside AI responses. The $50K pilot minimum is gone. Cost-per-click bidding, agency integrations, the whole apparatus. They’re projecting $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year.

The advertising angle isn’t what caught me. It’s that most organizations adopted ChatGPT through the side door — individual contributors building habits, managers looking the other way, eventually someone buying enterprise licenses. Bottom-up, undocumented, fast. Nobody wrote a policy for how AI fits into vendor evaluation or purchasing decisions because the tool felt neutral. On May 5, it stopped being neutral. Nobody’s process updated to match.

Sixty percent of Fortune 500 companies have ChatGPT Enterprise licenses. Almost none of them have a checkpoint that flags AI-assisted recommendations for human review when money is on the line. The governance cycle runs quarterly. The tool ships changes weekly. That gap has been widening since launch.

The fix is boring. Map which workflows touch AI. Add a second source anywhere procurement or vendor comparison is involved. Write a usage policy if you don’t have one. A week of work, maybe less. But most companies won’t do it until something goes wrong — because updating a process nobody owns is everyone’s second priority.