OpenAI has hired its first chief marketing officer, opening the door to an area of business that it has previously avoided, even while its competitors aired national TV ads and ran billboard campaigns in some of the world’s biggest cities.

Now, OpenAI is diving into the pool with a leader who has plenty of experience marketing trendy yet polarizing technology: Kate Rouch joins the company after serving as CMO for Coinbase since 2021, Ad Age first reported this week.

Rouch has big plans for taking OpenAI “on the offense,” she told Ad Age, which will include building out the company’s marketing team. But while Rouch did not disclose specifics regarding her agenda, experts predict that OpenAI will focus on earning trust from both enterprises and consumers. On the enterprise side, this could hinge on striking a swath of new partnerships to place its technology in an abundance of infrastructure. And on the consumer side, this could mean emphasizing its brand as a technological steward in the tradition of Apple. 

Rouch’s appointment comes as AI providers are doing more to embrace advertising into their businesses. Search engine Perplexity recently launched an ad format in its core platform, as did Google in its Gemini-powered AI Overviews. OpenAI is also reportedly considering how to bring ads into ChatGPT, although the company’s chief financial officer later said it had no plans to do so at this time.

As for its own marketing opportunities, Rouch and her team will have its work cut out for them. 

“This is the hardest CMO job of all CMO jobs, full stop,” said Tom Ajello, senior partner and global director of the experience, innovation and engineering practice at creative consultancy Lippincott.

The reasoning, according to Allejo, is that OpenAI is not merely selling a product or a company, but rather AI itself, in all of its glory and controversy. CEO Sam Altman has not been shy about his company’s ambition to be the face of the future of AI, frequently citing the pursuit of human-level cognitive abilities—also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI)—as its mission. 

Indeed, Rouch told Ad Age that promoting AGI as a benefit to all of humanity will be a key part of telling OpenAI’s story. But in the beginning, Rouch said, the marketing team’s focus will be on showing audiences the depth of what AI can offer them.

Below, how the company could try to do it.

First, enterprise 

While perhaps the most obvious path to instilling trust is through launching consumer-facing awareness campaigns, courting enterprises may be a more sensible approach for OpenAI, said Lippincott’s Ajello.

Because AI providers are all in the same horse race to earn adoption, what OpenAI is really fighting for is visibility, Ajello said. This has become even more necessary as competition in the space increases. Further, smaller AI startups are ingesting massive investments that are narrowing the resources gap between them and behemoths such as Google and Meta. Anthropic, for example, received a second $4 billion investment from Amazon last month to power the retail giant’s Alexa voice assistant, among other plans.

Reaching end-consumers is an important part of increasing one’s visibility, but OpenAI can maximize this effort by showing up in as much enterprise infrastructure as possible, Ajello said. The wider the variety of tools supporting its technology, the better. 

This reasoning harkens to Rouch’s vision of showing audiences the many use cases afforded by AI.

“An ad campaign doesn’t solve this,” Ajello said.

A more effective approach, according to Ajello, is to get AI in the hands of products that are heavily used by everyday people. Through their own experience, they can begin to see the many ways that AI can serve them. 

OpenAI has already started this process through its application programming interface (API) for ChatGPT, which companies can integrate in their own tools. It will be important for OpenAI to consider how formally it wants to show up in these use cases in order to capitalize on visibility, Ajello said. For example, ChatGPT branding was front-and-center when Apple announced this summer that the bot would help power Siri.

OpenAI will need to earn the trust of enterprise companies in order to integrate within their ecosystems. This will require significant efforts to build relationships with companies of different sectors, which itself could hinge on staying open to the various ways that companies want to use its AI technology, Ajello said. These will inevitably differ between industries that have little in common, such as publishing and banking. 

The bottom line, said Ajello, is that “OpenAI needs business-to-business to win.”

Courting consumers

Promoting trust will also play an outsized role as OpenAI courts consumers. Their goal, according to David Placek, founder and president of branding firm Lexicon, could be to represent themselves as a “guide brand” for the AI category. 

Guide brands are stewards of the industry in which they do business and help educate consumers on the larger space, Placek said. Even people who aren’t formal customers of the brand can still be influenced by it. The quintessential example of a guide brand is Apple, Placek said. What has further helped Apple’s cause is building beyond a single product to having an ecosystem of products, which OpenAI should attempt to do as well, according to Placek. 

Like Apple, OpenAI already benefits from a positive reputation in the eyes of consumers. The company is well regarded by Gen Z audiences and outperforms other tech companies when it comes to leveraging AI. According to a 2024 brand perceptions survey from Lippincott, nearly 60% of U.S. consumers said they trust OpenAI to use AI tools—16 points higher than Google and 23 points higher than Microsoft. 

While OpenAI’s reputation is helped by it being a first mover in the generative AI space, in order for it to remain a leader in the long term, the company needs to express to consumers what it does best, not first, Placek said.

Competitors such as Google have attempted this through large ad campaigns, including a short-lived TV spot during the Olympics. OpenAI has never launched this kind of campaign, but it is worth noting that Rouch has an affinity for such marketing, which she frequently spearheaded at Coinbase. 

The crypto company made waves in 2022 with a Super Bowl spot that solely consisted of a QR code bouncing across the screen. Rouch also led more pointed TV efforts, many of which sought to educate consumers about cryptocurrency’s role in an unjust financial system. They tend to run during highly watched telecasts such as NBA games, as is the case with the company’s latest ads, which launched last month.

“Rouch has worked in a category where you really have to think about how to build a brand,” Placek said.

Rouch did not disclose media plans for Open AI when speaking with Ad Age. OpenAI declined to comment on whether the company has or is hiring an agency partner. 

One point of possible friction that Rouch may have to deal with is OpenAI’s fixation on AGI. The implications of enabling human-level machine intelligence is not only an existential concern for many people, but it is also a goal that is far from guaranteed. Sam Altman claims AGI is only a few years away, yet other AI researchers—of which Altman is not—disagree.

For these reasons, OpenAI should seek to weaken the dependence of its company’s success on AGI, Placek said. This doesn’t mean they need to abandon the mission, but rather must do more to wrap it within a larger, less controversial goal of responsibility and safety.

Ultimately, this comes down to OpenAI “making itself [seem] more human,” Placek said.