Future of TV Briefing: How AI agents will figure into this year’s upfront negotiations

Claude and ChatGPT aren’t negotiating upfront deals between TV and streaming ad buyers and sellers. But their ilk will be part of this year’s upfront negotiations.

“The upfront is where we have that conversation,” said Disney svp of addressable sales Jamie Power. 

Disney has been testing agentic advertising capabilities and sees the upfront cycle as an opportunity to discuss with the buy side how to incorporate AI agents into ad deals. And it’s far from the only upfront seller looking to have those conversations.

After NBCUniversal’s test earlier this year of using agentic AI to sell ads in a live NFL game, companies including Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery took the opportunity to tout their own agentic efforts in their upfront presentations earlier this month.

Paramount, for example, has developed an AI seller agent that it is testing in a closed beta period. “Clients will be able to connect buyer agents across both the IAB [Tech Lab’s Agentic Advertising Management Protocols] and [the separate Ad Context Protocol] and explore packages that best fit their brief across our inventory,” said Leo O’Connor, evp of streaming at Paramount’s advertising division.

Upfront sellers aren’t just talking up agentic AI because it looks good on a pitch deck (though that has to be part of it). But of all the ad-supported media channels, TV and streaming stands to especially benefit from the adoption of agentic AI. 

“OpenRTB can streamline and automate the buying of certain things, but understanding bespoke ad formats, different sponsorship integrations – OpenRTB doesn’t really do that. But you can ask those questions of an [AI] agent and get those answers and start to automate some of that higher-end part of the market. And frankly TV is uniquely in that space,” NBCUniversal chief product officer and evp of ad products and solutions Ryan McConville said on the Digiday Podcast earlier this year.

“I could see at least the upfront negotiations and the upfront work to get a Deal ID live really benefitting from agentic workflows,” said Jill Steinhauser, group svp of platform monetization and partnerships at WBD.

That opportunity to automate what otherwise can’t be automated is a big one. But there’s also a big pile of money at stake. That’s why there’s an urgency to assess how AI agents can be involved in ad buying, if not for this year’s upfront deals but for future ones.

“It’s less about it fitting into upfront dealmaking. I do feel that AI will play a role in the year ahead in regards to helping both buyers and sellers plan better [and] smarter, report better and smarter,” said Evan Adlman, evp of commercial sales and revenue operations at AMC Global Media.

“We’re going to partner with some buyers in their testing agentic buying and the selling agents. But it’s very, very early. So we don’t expect this to be a big thing for TelevisaUnivision in this upfront. I think there’s another six months to a year of testing and learning on this for us,” said TelevisaUnivision president of U.S. advertising sales and marketing John Kozack.

All of that being said, if advertisers want to do more than talk about agentic AI in this year’s upfront, sellers are unlikely to mute those conversations. Said WBD’s Steinhauser, “I do think you’re going to see some agentic buys this upfront.”

What we’ve heard

“The systems we use to count views are completely separate from the systems that are in our advertising backend, as it relates to what advertisers are being charged for.”

— Twitch’s chief product officer Mike Minton

Numbers to know

-18%: Percentage decline year over year in the average fee brands paid TikTok mega-influencers in Q1 2026.

$20 billion: How much money brands are expected to spend running ads against live sports programming in 2027.

-1.1%: Versant’s percentage year-over-year decline in revenue in Q1 2026.

What we’ve covered

WTF is viewbotting?:

• Viewbotting is when live streams get an influx of artificial viewers powered by bots.
• Viewbotting may pose a problem for brands looking to work with streamers who earn a specific amount of views.

Read more about viewbotting here.

The NBA’s contract with YouTuber Kenny Beecham could be a new blueprint for sports leagues:

• The NBA is ramping up its bet on creator-led commentary, elevating YouTube basketball star Kenny Beecham to the center of its fan-facing media strategy.
• Beecham, who has more than 4.16 million followers on his own channels, now fronts an original basketball trivia series, hosts official telecasts and appears on NBA TV — all while remaining an independent creator.

Read more about the NBA’s creator strategy here.

Production and media squeeze lead brands to run campaigns for longer:

• Data from ad measurement firm Extreme Reach (XR) showed that 17.9% of Super Bowl ad campaigns ran for six months or more last year, triple the number that ran for the same amount of time in 2023.
• XR data showed that brand spending on celebrity talent rose to $348.6 million in the first quarter of 2026, a 25% increase on the same period in 2025.

Read more about longer campaign cycles here.

Twitch tweaks monetization tools to try and help smaller creators build a following:

• Twitch is slowly but deliberately evolving its creator model, widening access to monetization tools that once made it a haven for smaller, community-driven streamers.
• Twitch is making new monetization features available to all users, removing the gate that previously limited them to affiliates and partners.

Read more about Twitch’s monetization changes here.

What we’re reading

Netflix’s first daily live show:

After getting into live specials and live sports, Netflix is now getting into daily live shows with Charlamagne tha God’s morning radio show “The Breakfast Club” that will stream live starting June 1, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Peacock’s subscriber-driver:

The reality-dating show Love Island has become Peacock’s breakout hit and attracted nearly 2 million subscribers for the NBCUniversal-owned streamer last year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Apple’s iPhone-shot MLS broadcast:

Apple exclusively used 15 iPhone 17 Pro cameras to stream a live MLS match over the weekend, the first time a major live sports event was shot exclusively on iPhone, according to Variety.

Fox’s World Cup rights bargain:

Fox is paying less than $500 million to broadcast next month’s World Cup matches, thanks to its lawsuit threat over the 2022 tournament, according to The New York Times.