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Every major ad platform is building AI to optimize itself.
But media buyers don’t spend their entire day hunkered down inside of any one platform. They hop around pulling reports from a DSP, a social platform and an ad server, reconciling the numbers when they don’t match, QA-ing campaigns and troubleshooting why a line item isn’t delivering.
And that’s the stuff that nobody’s automating, says Tanja Mimica, COO and co-founder of agentic AI startup Kovva, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“Meta is building AI and getting really good at optimizing Meta, and The Trade Desk is really good at optimizing The Trade Desk,” says Mimica, but the “majority of the work of a media buyer lives between the platforms.”
Mimica, who studied animal physiology in Australia and went into veterinary practice management before landing in ad tech, co-founded Kovva to tackle exactly that.
Kovva has agents that plug into around 50 tools that media buyers already use, including DSPs, search and social platforms, verification partners, Slack and Teams, so there’s no new dashboard to learn.
Buyers typically start with a daily or weekly briefing sent to email, Slack or Teams that recaps the past 24 hours in their accounts. They can cross-check that with what they’re seeing in the platforms, ask the agent follow-up questions and, once it proves itself, start scheduling recurring tasks and handing off more complex workflows, a shift that takes at least three to four weeks.
But buyers are still pretty cautious about delegating anything high-stakes or hard to undo, like setting up a campaign with a large budget.
“Which I think is perfectly understandable,” Mimica says. “As someone who’s trafficked campaigns before, I wouldn’t either.”
Kovva builds its guardrails outside its agents, meaning that the rules and limits are set by people, she says, and an agent doesn’t have the authority “to raise its own budget limit or approve its own change.”
And, for now at least, every “write” action – the term for when an agent changes something inside of a platform, as opposed to just reading data – needs human approval.
“We’re planning on keeping that in place for a long time,” Mimica says.
Also in this episode: Mimica’s journey from animal hospitals to ad tech (including how she used a baby name book to christen her first ad tech startup), the AI holdouts and internal champions who can make or break adoption and pitching the business case for agentic AI beyond just the amount of time saved.
For more articles featuring Tanja Mimica, click here.
