Channel, competitor, or infrastructure?

Sat in on a behind-closed-doors executive round table this week where the CMO and the CIO disagreed, politely, about what ChatGPT actually is to the business. The CMO treats it as an emerging media channel. The CIO treats it as a piece of critical infrastructure already embedded in half the workflows. Neither of them is wrong. Both of them can’t be right at the same time.

The reason it matters now is that OpenAI is standing up ad sales teams in France, Germany and Ireland. Inside a year they’ll have commercial presence in every major advertising region globally. That closes the window in which a board can treat this as an experiment run by the innovation team.

Three postures, and only three. It’s a channel: you buy inventory, you measure it, marketing owns it. It’s a competitor: it sits between you and your customer, and the response is strategic, not tactical. It’s infrastructure: procurement, security, data residency, contract terms, board-level risk register.

Most organisations I’m chatting with haven’t picked one yet. They’re quietly running all three postures in different corners of the business, and the postures contradict each other.

If the board doesn’t decide, procurement will. And procurement’s answer won’t be the strategic one.