"Agencies and tech platforms alike boasted and pitched their AI-powered autonomous media buying from the CES stage. Meanwhile, buyers find it all more interesting than urgent, according to Digiday executive editor of news Seb Joseph. "Everyone wants to do things faster, cheaper, better," Joseph said on the Digiday Podcast. "But ultimately, that is about everything up until an ad is bought.""
"Ultimately, whilst you'll have certain players launching agents, you'd have to look at it more in the round and whether or not you're seeing more activity from the buy-side as well. For LLMs to replace humans in that process, and some of the tech that's already there - they would need to be trained on the programmatic supply chain itself, a system that's widely acknowledged to be noisy, incomplete and adversarial in many respects."
CES 2026 focused heavily on agentic AI and autonomous media buying presented by agencies and tech platforms. Buyers viewed these capabilities as interesting but not urgent. The industry emphasized pragmatic AI use cases over speculative fads, positioning agents to speed and reduce cost in media buying. Meaningful change depends on buy-side adoption and sellers building their own agents for autonomous decisioning. LLMs aiming to replace humans in programmatic processes would need training on the programmatic supply chain, which is noisy, incomplete and adversarial, risking the entrenchment of existing blind spots and increased costs.
Read at Digiday
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