The age of artificial intelligence is here, and marketers in 2026 face a brand new landscape where the technology is woven into nearly every aspect of the promoting industry. AI is changing how campaigns are created, deployed and measured, and will help marketers finally deliver on holy grails like personalization at scale and closed-loop measurement as emerging channels, from connected TV to retail media, develop into performance driven.
But there’s still lots of work that should be done to bring those guarantees to fruition. As stakeholders jockey for position, often promising one-stop shops and turnkey solutions powered by AI, the savviest marketers might want to navigate the modified ecosystem by separating reality from hype — especially around emerging areas like agentic AI.
When it involves AI in 2026 and beyond, marketers would do well to embrace a version of the serenity prayer: accepting what they can not change, courageously changing what they can and properly knowing the difference between the 2.
“You have a look at a few of these structures, and also you begin to say, when the whole lot works, it truly is like magic,” said Jacob Davis, executive director and global head of performance at Crossmedia. “It very infrequently works perfectly.”
In the previous couple of years, major agencies, ad platforms, media conglomerates and ad-tech corporations have rolled out AI-powered solutions that seek to automate much, if not all, of the promoting process. When launching campaigns, advertisers can pick and select from Meta’s Advantage+ suite, Google’s Performance Max and Amazon’s full-funnel campaign offering; WPP Open, Publicis’ CoreAI and Omnicom’s Omni; and publisher offerings from giants NBCUniversal and Disney.
While they’ve different capabilities and components, these solutions look to diminish costs and increase performance, often at the price of transparency into their machinations. In that way, AI supercharges pre-existing machine-driven automation systems — “the algorithm on steroids” said Mathieu Roche, co-founder and CEO at ID5.
“It’s still very much a black box, which works in the event you’re just occupied with outcomes, nevertheless they define outcomes,” Roche said. “I do not think it really works for the top-end of the pyramid of advertisers, but for small- to long-tail advertisers who’re on the lookout for traffic to web sites or app downloads… there’s a sliver of the market that actually welcomes that.”
Platform, agency challenges
Over the previous couple of years, AI has been integrated into marketing workflows around creative, planning, targeting and optimization. Each area represents a special challenge for AI and a level of tolerance for outsourcing by marketers. For example, brands are more likely to retain control over their creative but more more likely to hand over audience planning to AI, Roche claimed. The way media planners and buyers work could change essentially the most as platforms roll out plain-language chatbots that assist in generating media plans.
However, these AI-powered platforms are often mass-market solutions, not purpose-built for individual marketers. The query stays whether or not they can truly address brand needs.
“Do they work the way in which they’re speculated to work? Because these platforms are so big, they don’t seem to be really changing things based on what a brand wants, even in the event that they’re willing to spend money,” said Unni Kurup, director of client consulting and strategy at Theorem.
As brands look to navigate this latest AI-powered landscape, the role of agencies could evolve, turning the adland players right into a layer of connectivity and enablement for environments like Meta and Amazon — walled gardens which have used the AI moment to strengthen their positions, explained Nicole Greene, vp and analyst at Gartner.
“Every one in all these platforms goes to have their very own data. They’re going to own the experience, and now they will own the creative, optimization and measurement. … You’re playing by their rules,” Greene said. “Agencies could be a terrific way for brands that otherwise haven’t got the capability to do it on their very own to have visibility across those platforms.”
Amid the push for automation, marketers still face questions around identity, an area that continues to be in flux despite Google’s decision to not deprecate third-party cookies. Marketers must determine whether to spend on media or on media plus identity resolution, which is potentially more practical. Currently, many are selecting the previous, and possibly making a mistake, Davis said.
“If I could put $100,000 into LiveRamp, or I could put $100,000 into Meta, the smart selection can be $100,000 in LiveRamp,” Davis said, using the info collaboration platform that recently secured a strategic partnership with Publicis as an example.
The ability to justify performance media offered by AI-powered ad platforms to other C-suite stakeholders could make it a better selection, especially as marketers develop into wary of high fees in programmatic and suspicious of additional players within the media supply chain taking a cut of media spend. Through all of it, marketers proceed to face issues pinpointing which media drives conversions and value.
“Was it because we had a Kargo SSP overlay with PubMatic? Was it due to the creative that we ran? Was it due to LiveRamp, or was it because we ran it through The Trade Desk?” Davis posited, illustrating a typical marketer quandary.
The rise of the agents
Just as marketers were getting comfortable with a brand new AI-powered established order, the following step of the automation revolution has begun with the expansion of agentic AI: fully autonomous systems that can coordinate without human intervention and will simplify and optimize applications like programmatic promoting.
WPP and Omnicom began 2026 by announcing latest agentic AI offerings. PubMatic debuted an agentic operating system intended to resolve pain points around programmatic that launched with partners including WPP Media, Butler/Till, Wpromote and MiQ, and is an element of a consortium that launched the brand new Ad Context Protocol. Meanwhile, the IAB rolled out frameworks and roadmaps for the agentic future — a possibility for adland to learn from the mistakes of past technical developments and bake in standardization from the beginning.
“Although AI solutions will increasingly take shape, the industry should expect several false starts in deploying agentic solutions,” said IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur in an announcement. “The promise of agentic AI is real and meaningful, yet its practical application would require years of market experimentation, standardization and alignment across platforms, agencies and publishers.”
Marketers that adopt agentic AI and let agents plan, test and constantly optimize campaigns will save time and resources on laborious tasks, giving them time to work on big-picture ideas like goal setting and experimentation.
“Agentic AI will change marketing by shifting the burden of execution,” said Upwave CEO Chris Kelly in emailed comments. “The real advantage comes from agents making hundreds of small optimization decisions in real time… way over any team could manage manually. Brands that adopt these systems early will simply move faster and learn faster than their competitors.”
But like other applications of AI in promoting, agentic AI success isn’t guaranteed. Along with sorting through a brand new alphabet soup of agent protocols — AdCP, MCP, UCP — marketers might want to have their very own data, APIs and other tech stack elements prepared.
“Do you’ve got quality APIs where you can go through data? That’s going to be really vital, to ensure that you simply’re agent ready, in order that as these different platforms begin to consolidate and permit for more accessibility, you are capable of deliver into these environments,” said Gartner’s Greene. “People [who say] it’s all going to attach and be seamless… if that happens, I can probably sell you a bridge.”
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