Elon Musk plans to introduce advertising into the answers of X’s artificial intelligence chatbot and power the social media platform’s flailing ads business with AI after the departure of chief executive Linda Yaccarino.

During a live discussion with advertisers broadcast on X on Wednesday, the billionaire entrepreneur said his company would allow marketers to pay to appear in suggestions from Grok, the platform’s chatbot. Grok was developed by Musk’s AI start-up xAI, which acquired X in March for $45bn.

“Our focus thus far has just been on making Grok the smartest, most accurate AI in the world and I think we’ve largely succeeded in that. So we’ll turn our attention to how do we pay for those expensive GPUs,” said Musk, referring to graphics processing units, the costly chips needed to power AI applications.