As workflows get easier to automate

The first shift is in ad tech, with such technologies making previously complex workflows easier to automate; this movement is likely to prompt a shift in competitive advantage away from managing the process of campaign delivery to making better real-time decisions, i.e., firms that can better establish which signals to use, what creative to show, where to place an ad and how to improve results will thrive in the AI-first era. 

“The workflow moat begins to evaporate with the AI technology that is coming out,” McKenna told attendees at the November 9 event, hosted in New York City.

This is likely to further intensify competition among demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, agencies, retail media networks and major platforms over who controls advertising intelligence. Kawaja argued that efficiency matters, but effectiveness could matter much more. “I like to think of efficiency as the 10% incremental improvement, whereas the effectiveness could make a 10x difference,” he added. 

For the open web to maintain its (modest) share of advertisers’ budgets — which the LUMA team described as fragmented compared with the scale and simplicity of large platforms — the challenge will be to deliver both easier workflows and demonstrably stronger outcomes.

AI compresses the path to purchase

The second shift is on the consumer side. AI assistants could bring research, discovery and comparison into a single interface, compressing the traditional purchase journey. The speakers expect people to remain involved for now, using agents to delegate tasks rather than handing over decisions entirely. If advertising becomes part of these experiences, consumer trust will be essential.

Who controls the next ad dollar?

Together, these changes could reshape how advertisers attribute value, when it comes to the efficacy of their media spend, with several presenters at the event forecasting that such technologies will result in a more competitive market, as well as potential consolidation – a likely conclusion for investment bankers. 

“Decisioning coupled with unique signal is what will differentiate the companies, separate the winners from the losers, and finally promote consolidation,” added Kawaja.  

The key to success in such a scenario will be: scale, access to useful signals, decision-making intelligence and trust. However, the utmost metric will depend on whether platforms can show that their decisions improve results without undermining consumers’ confidence.

Speaking separately with Digiday on the sidelines of the event, Ana Milicevic, cofounder of Sparrow Advisers, described such technologies as: “Like this is the brain that we’re trying to outsource to a bunch of agents.”  

Meanwhile, speaking separately with Digiday, Ravi Patel, co-founder and CEO of SWYM.ai, drew a distinction between setting budgets across platforms and picking individual impressions. Google, Meta and Amazon still make those impression-level decisions within their own systems, he said, describing unified media platforms, or UMPs, to quote the fast-emerging industry parlance. “It can manage the ‘what’ and the ‘how much.’ It can’t manage the ‘which impression.’ That distinction is the whole story,” he noted.