SAMANTHA JACOBSON to GPT UNITED — HERE WE GO ✅

SAMANTHA JACOBSON from The Trade Desk to GPT United. Five years as Chief Strategy Officer. One of ad tech's sharpest partnership minds. Now building OpenAI's monetization empire from the inside. HERE WE GO ✅

GPT United confirmed the signing this week. Samantha Jacobson, Chief Strategy Officer of The Trade Desk, is leaving the programmatic advertising giant to join OpenAI as VP of Partnerships (Monetization). She will stay on The Trade Desk's board of directors — keeping a formal foothold at the club she helped build. 1

In her new role, Jacobson will lead OpenAI's monetization partnerships — shaping how the company works with partners across advertising, distribution, platform infrastructure, and emerging business models. She reports to Torben Severson, VP and Head of Global Business Development. The timing is no coincidence. 2

Jacobson is not a generalist executive who drifted into AI. She is a precision instrument built for exactly the job OpenAI just handed her.

She joined The Trade Desk in 2021 as Chief Strategy Officer, a role she held for more than five years. During that stretch, the company grew into the largest independent demand-side platform on the planet — a programmatic powerhouse processing trillions of bid requests per day. Her fingerprints are on the strategic architecture behind that scale.

Before The Trade Desk, she spent years at Oracle's data cloud division, working across strategy, business development, and data partnerships. Before that: eBay and Milo.com, where she specialized in marketplace strategy and platform partnerships. She holds degrees from Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School — credentials that mark her as someone comfortable at the intersection of business model design and technology infrastructure. 3

The Trade Desk's CEO Jeff Green addressed the departure directly on the Q1 2026 earnings call, calling the timing "interestingly timed" but expressing genuine pride: "I'll confirm what the article asserted — Samantha is taking a role at OpenAI. On a personal level, I'm excited for her and I'm extremely confident in her abilities."

That phrase — "interestingly timed" — is Green being diplomatic. The timing tells the whole story.

OpenAI is at the exact inflection point where it needs what Jacobson has: the ability to build a monetization machine from scratch. In May 2026, OpenAI opened its self-serve ChatGPT Ads Manager to any U.S. business with a credit card, dropped the $50,000 minimum entry barrier, added CPC bidding and a Conversions API, and began pitching brands on ChatGPT as a performance marketing channel. Internal models project $2 billion in ad revenue by end of 2026, scaling toward $102 billion by 2030. 4

Building that into reality requires someone who has already done it elsewhere. The Trade Desk's moat is its partnership network — relationships with publishers, data providers, agencies, and retail media operators built over a decade. Jacobson helped design and maintain those relationships. OpenAI needs the same wiring, built at speed.

She is not coming to OpenAI to learn how advertising works. She is coming to tell OpenAI how it should work.

Jacobson fills a gap that was becoming hard to ignore. OpenAI has world-class researchers and a product that hundreds of millions of people use. What it lacks is a seasoned operator to translate that usage into a sustainable partnership ecosystem.

The VP of Partnerships (Monetization) role sits at the intersection of three of OpenAI's biggest bets: the ChatGPT ads business, its platform API distribution deals with enterprise partners, and the emerging infrastructure layer where OpenAI wants to become the default AI backbone for businesses across industries. Jacobson's mandate covers all three.

Her board seat at The Trade Desk is not a ceremonial gesture. It is a live intelligence channel into one of the most sophisticated buy-side platforms in advertising — a strategic advantage as OpenAI tries to position ChatGPT Ads as a legitimate competitor to Google and Meta's duopoly.

The archetypal move here echoes Carolyn Everson's departure from Meta to join Instacart as President in 2021 — an advertising executive who had spent years building a platform's revenue engine, then moved to a company that needed exactly that institutional knowledge. The career logic was identical: when a platform reaches critical mass but hasn't yet wired up its commercial infrastructure, it goes out and finds the person who has already built that at someone else's club.

Jacobson's move is the AI era's version of that transfer. The Trade Desk is not a struggling club — it controls more than 80% of U.S. retailer data in its marketplace and has spent fifteen years building the kind of partner trust that cannot be manufactured overnight. 5 Leaving it for OpenAI is not a distress transfer. It is a calculated bet on where the next decade of advertising infrastructure gets built.

OpenAI is trying to become the ad platform for the AI era. They just signed the player who knows how to make that real.

#AILeague