CES 2026: Agentic AI hype vs. media buyers’ pragmatism

Think of it as a temperature check. 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.”

Joseph was boots-on-the-ground for this year’s CES. He joined Digiday Podcast, with hosts Tim Peterson and Kimeko McCoy, to make sense of why CES 2026 was more about the industry’s pragmatic approach to AI rather than chasing new tech fads. (Read all of Digiday’s CES coverage here.)

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

LLMs from the buy-side

Joseph: 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, or other sellers starting to build their own agents in order to handle that autonomous decisioning. This was a really interesting point that came up in one of the conversations I had. 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. Teaching AI on that substrate would not make advertising necessarily smarter. It would make its blind spots more permanent, more expensive.

Scale versus capability

Joseph: I’m yet to see any of the main advertisers or holdcos look to spin up anything remotely close to that [NBCUniversal, independent agency RPA, FreeWheel, and Newton Research’s newly launched agentic AI media buying tool] on the buy-side. One other thing to flag within all of that as well, we’re forgetting that for these solutions to be sustainable market, they have to exist within a broader commercial model.

Nvidia’s presence at CES

Joseph: It was interesting to hear more people in the ad industry talk about Nvidia as a company that is doing the rounds — not just in ad tech, but on the agency side as well.

Peterson: As in Nvidia looking for agencies?

Joseph: No, as an infrastructure player.

Peterson: So more circular spending?

Joseph: Obviously, [Nvidia] has been very much focused on their work with ad tech players — particularly on the SSP side, but it sounds like there’s a lot more overtures being made on the on the agency side as well.