• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 3 hours ago

As OpenAI began piloting ads in ChatGPT, The Knot Worldwide began exploring how it could connect with audiences through conversational artificial intelligence (AI) in chatbots and possibly through agentic commerce.

The Knot Worldwide is among a handful of companies that are participating in OpenAI Ads pilot in the U.S.

This comes after launching a ChatGPT app in early February for its new wedding app that leverages 30 years of proprietary data from 200,000 small business owners.

The idea is to streamline planning processes, turning what once took more than 20 hours into seconds. 

The integration leverages The Knot’s leading vendor marketplace and more than 14.6 million reviews to help couples move from open-ended ideation to confident decision making.

“It’s early days, but we are using this pilot to test and learn how ads may enhance the couple’s experience when planning their wedding using ChatGPT,” Jenny Lewis, CMO and president of Global Media Solutions for The Knot Worldwide, told MediaPost. “Our vision is to determine how natively show up in these environments to make it easier for them.”

Although the company cannot yet handle a complete agentic AI workflow with multiple agents, imagine the possibilities of a system that not only suggests ideas but executes the planning cycle by reasoning through the couple’s goals -- managing the budget, tracking payments, and coordinating with vendors autonomously.

About 36% of couples use AI in their wedding planning. The “Make It Yours” feature that launched late last year helps couples plan their wedding by leveraging AI.

It uses agentic principles and data to do stylistic reasoning by analyzing a couple's "Favorites" vision board.

Then AI autonomously identifies an aesthetic and matches it with vetted local vendors that fit that exact need.

AI can scan a photo seen online to help vendors bring that look and feel to life, Lewis said.

It helps turn that floral arrangement seen in a photo to life by pairing the couple with a florist,” she said.

The Knot offers services such as a budgeting tool, vendor marketplace, paper and invitations service, along with a gift registry, to help couples plan their wedding. It works with about 200,000 U.S. vendors that also will become available to couples within the app.

Lewis declined to comment on how marketers at The Knot will buy media in ChatGPT, managed or self-service, but described the company’s overall approach to advertising and marketing.

The Knot Worldwide has a media-buying team in-house where most of the media is bought. For larger media buys, the team will work with agencies.

“We buy across multiple platforms, and continually think about how to diversify our media buys,” she said.

Meta Platforms, Google, TikTok, and Reddit are all part of that media mix, but The Knot Worldwide always experiments with other channels, she said. The company has done streaming in the past, but nothing is running today.

The ChatGPT Ads pilot went live last Monday.

Last year, The Knot unveiled an AI update to its planning experience service -- a personalized planning journey with AI-powered, local vendor recommendations that fit a couple’s style.

But think of the possibilities when its services can move beyond simple chatbots or ChatGPT to provide agentic agents that can budget, reason, plan, and take action. 

It could become the next step in wedding planning, transitioning the company from a directory to an execution engine that can provide multiple types of services powered by decades of proprietary wedding data.