The case against AI agents for programmatic ad buying

"We don't tell ChatGPT, "Go and set up this campaign and activate this campaign and select the best targeting options" for a lot of logical reasons. Mostly, it's going to hallucinate. If an AI agent errs by a decimal point, that could not only be financially catastrophic but a fireable offense (and it wouldn't be the AI agent getting the axe). But there's also the question of whether AI agents would be able to work quickly enough to function in real-time bidding auction."

"Yes and no. That may seem like a mixed answer, but it was clearly made by agency executives throughout last week's Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in New Orleans, La. "There's a role for AI in general and a lot of different avenues, but I think when it comes to programmatic activations, we're not trusting that to large language model-based agents," said Christopher Francia, director of product development and client performance at Attention Arc, in a live recording of the Digiday Podcast during DPMS."

Programmatic advertising infrastructure is being updated to accommodate AI agents. Agency executives express mixed views on using AI agents for programmatic ad buying, balancing potential benefits against significant risks. Hallucination risks can produce costly errors and lead to severe consequences for human operators. Real-time bidding speed and protocol adoption create technical barriers for agentic involvement. The IAB Tech Lab's Agentic RTB Framework aims to address speed concerns but requires widespread industry adoption. AI agents are currently best applied to lower-stakes tasks such as campaign brainstorming, insight summaries, analysis and ideation.

Read at Digiday