Once held as a uniquely human pursuit, Creativity now faces the disruptive force of AI.  From ACR targeting to in-scene placement to dynamic creative to Hollywood production, this session will explore a range of recent technological innovations at the intersection of AI and advertising.  AI is now the savant entering the rooms of Holdco, creative agencies, publishers, media co, production houses, ad serving platforms, SSPs, and studios.

Publisher revenue used to be simple: bring audiences to your site and monetize the visit. Not anymore.

Discovery now happens across platforms, feeds, and AI-driven environments—often far from owned properties. Audiences expect content to come to them, and publishers are left figuring out how to capture value wherever that attention lives.

This session explores how publishers are adapting—rethinking distribution, partnerships, and monetization to stay flexible (and profitable) in a fragmented world.

AI is being applied across every stage of the campaign lifecycle — from planning and forecasting to activation, optimization, and measurement.

Agency leaders will share how they’re using AI-powered insights and automation to improve performance across channels, connect workflows, and move faster from decision to execution. As these systems scale, the question isn’t just where AI fits, but how it’s reshaping how campaigns are built, optimized, and measured end to end.

AI has completely disrupted the consumer journey across discovery, purchase, and advocacy. Jeremy Hull, Chief Solutions officer at Brainlabs, will separate fears from facts by digging into these new consumer behaviors and share how to uplevel your Generative Engine Optimization so your brand shows up in AI results. In this workshop you'll learn specific actions you can take right now to show up across AI search and agentic commerce so your brand can start winning in AI search today and in the future.

AI agents can write your briefs, optimize your buys, and even deliver reports — but how often are you stopping to ask where they're getting the information and whether you should actually trust the outcomes? This hands-on workshop is built for practitioners who want to get sharper about the questions to ask before AI makes campaign recommendations (and then after it tells you the campaign is working).

Ad ops teams are under pressure to deliver more with a lot less. And the work isn't getting any easier. Drawing on experience scaling infrastructure across thousands of publishers, Jordan Cauley will share how AI is reshaping publisher workflows—from trafficking and troubleshooting to optimization and reporting. Where does automation fit into your day-to-day? And where does it fall short? You'll come away with tools and tips to make your team more efficient while freeing up time for higher-level work.

Attribution is chaos: every platform takes credit, IDs are vanishing, and the same campaign can look like a success in one report and a failure in another. This session cuts through the noise with real‑world incrementality and lift tests, MMM and experiment design, and how AI is speeding up what and how we test. Leaders from brands, agencies, platforms, and publishers will show how to read conflicting signals, separate true incremental impact from noise, and tie decisions to business outcomes

Everyone says they want closer partnerships. Better data. More transparency. But when you get into the details—agentic workflows, Open Path, direct deals vs. programmatic pipes—the expectations don’t always line up.

This town hall puts buy-side and sell-side leaders in the same room for a candid conversation about what’s actually working in today’s market—and where friction is still slowing deals down. What does the buy side really value right now? Where are publishers overbuilding or underdelivering? And how are new models like agentic media and supply path optimization reshaping those expectations in real time?

Come ready to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and get a clearer read on what it takes to win business today.

After a full day of navigating the shift to AI in programmatic, join us for The Social Signal — an evening designed to cut through the noise and amplify what matters most: real conversations.

This relaxed networking reception brings together brand, agency, and tech leaders to connect beyond the dashboards, share insights, and build the relationships that power what’s next.

Frameworks like AAMP, AdCP, and A2A are built for agents to plan, buy, and optimize autonomously — but they require data that's accurate, connected, and accessible across systems. For most organizations, that foundation still isn't in place.

This session introduces a practical maturity roadmap to assess where you are and what it takes to move forward — from disconnected, siloed data with no AI, to integrated cross-channel intelligence, to a business layer that maps to LTV, CAC, and real growth.

Whether you're brand, agency, or partner side, you'll leave with a framework to assess exactly where your maturity stands — and what realistic progress looks like from each seat.

AI is showing up in every pitch — but adoption tells a different story.

Digging into research across advertisers and publishers, Advertiser Perceptions sheds light on how AI is actually being used across creative, optimization, and activation — from generative AI and GEO to DSP-driven automation. They'll highlight how teams are adjusting to shifts in discovery, how much control advertisers are willing to hand over to AI-powered systems, and what’s slowing broader adoption inside organizations.

The publishers winning right now aren’t just sitting on better data — they’re using AI to understand which audiences will perform before a campaign even runs.

This session explores how a focus on driving outcomes is fueling commercial innovation at Future. From a predictive layer that maps advertiser briefs to high-intent segments and surfaces unexpected affinities (like tennis fans driving fashion ROAS), to new approaches that help advertisers show up in AI-driven environments where decisions are increasingly made, Future is rethinking how campaigns are planned and activated.

Attendees will learn how first-party data can be leveraged into something buyers can act on, and how moving beyond generic campaigns to outcome-driven partnerships can unlock more efficient, sustainable growth in the AI era.

Everyone's talking about agentic AI in theory. This is the session where two people who already did it show you how it works — what the data scientist sees, what the media buyer controls, and what the results look like.  Leaders from Canvas and Chalice walk through the decisions, workflows, and signals behind the shift toward ARTF so you can start building your own playbook.

AI agents are already executing media workflows end-to-end — from RFP responses to campaign optimization. But just because an agent can handle these tasks doesn't mean it should — at least not without the right framework for deciding what to delegate.

In this hands-on workshop, U of Digital's Tameka Kee and Myles Younger will demo a live agentic workflow, walk you through a decision matrix for identifying which tasks are ready for automation (and which aren't), and run exercises that help you map agents to your team's actual workflows. You'll leave with a 90-day action plan for getting your team ready — not just a list of tools to try.

As AI answer engines threaten to swallow the open web, the click is becoming a commodity. For publishers, the challenge is proving your data is more than just words on a page. For marketers, it’s finding high-value audiences in a world where cookies are gone and search is saturated.

In this session, Fandom reveals how they’ve turned 45 million pages of community wikis into FanDNA Helix—an AI data engine that maps "Thematic Identity." We’ll show how moving beyond simple keywords to "Contextual on Steroids" lets you decode a fan's emotional DNA, uncovering non-intuitive connections that traditional data misses.

In this session, Fandom reveals how they’ve turned 45 million pages of community wikis into FanDNA Helix—an AI data engine that maps "Thematic Identity." We’ll show how moving beyond simple keywords to "Contextual on Steroids" lets you decode a fan's emotional DNA, uncovering non-intuitive connections that traditional data misses.

AI agents can write your briefs, optimize your buys, and even deliver reports — but how often are you stopping to ask where they're getting the information and whether you should actually trust the outcomes? This hands-on workshop is built for practitioners who want to get sharper about the questions to ask before AI makes campaign recommendations (and then after it tells you the campaign is working).

As LLMs, agents, and answer engines sit between consumers and content, every brand, publisher, and platform is being forced to rethink how audiences discover information and who captures the value.

In this conversation, Dr. Jon Roberts, Chief Innovation Officer of People Inc., explores how the answer economy is reshaping traffic patterns, content economics, and programmatic monetization, and what it takes to thrive when AI is both your biggest distribution risk and your biggest growth opportunity. Brands, agencies, and publishers can expect concrete frameworks, hard lessons for protecting and pricing their content, redesigning planning and measurement for AI-first discovery, and building workflows to turn intelligence into outcomes across the media supply.

AI capabilities are accelerating across digital advertising — from planning and optimization to creative and measurement — but true adoption remains uneven. In many organizations, AI is present in tools yet unresolved in governance, accountability, and decision ownership.

This session examines how AI is reshaping the power structure of digital advertising before it is fully embedded. As automation expands, who controls configuration authority? Who defines acceptable risk thresholds? And how should leaders prepare for increasing tail risk in tightly coupled automated systems?

Attendees will explore the concept of a formal AI Decision Control Layer and learn why a strategy of “experiment, but fast follow” may outperform both hesitation and reckless automation. The goal is not simply to deploy AI — but to govern it in a way that protects margin, stabilizes risk, and strengthens long-term competitive advantage.

This conversation explores how A+E Global Media’s Audience Innovation team is leveraging programmatic and AI to reshape its digital, CTV, and FAST business. VP of Programmatic Joseph Lerner will share how his team approaches inventory strategy, programmatic activation, and partnerships across SSPs, DSPs, and tech providers to maximize yield while protecting viewer experience. Attendees will walk away with practical examples of how a major TV publisher is evolving its offerings for clients using AI-driven decisioning, packaging, and deal execution.

The next frontier in programmatic buying isn't just better algorithms, but greater automation. This highly technical workshop is for practitioners who want to take direct control of their campaigns through AI-powered scripting. Attendees will be guided through practical exercises in a common DSP environment (like DV360), learning how to write and implement scripts that automate tasks such as budget pacing, bid adjustments, and creative rotation based on real-time performance data. This session is designed to empower attendees to build their own custom AI solutions for immediate efficiency gains.

Key Takeaways for Attendees:

• An introduction to writing and implementing AI-driven scripts in a major DSP.
• Practical code examples for automating common programmatic tasks.
• A framework for developing custom automation to solve unique campaign challenges.

With a focus on coaching metaphors, this talk explores how to reskill and motivate media teams living through constant AI disruption. Attendees hear how to build psychological safety, experimentation culture, and shared language between data scientists, creatives, and marketers.

Building off the momentum of the past two days, you’ll join your peers in focused interest areas for deeper dives into the topics that matter most. Expect actionable takeaways and fresh inspiration tailored to your needs. The best part? You shape the conversation! 

Topics include:

• AI Agents
• Growing Direct Revenue
• Data Strategies
• Diversifying Traffic
• Premium Programmatic: PMPs, PGs, and Curation

Let’s bring it home. After two days of learning at Programmatic AI, the AdExchanger editorial team will recap the most newsworthy moments and memorable takeways from the event during a live podcast recording of The Big Story. With their signature insights and thought-provoking commentary, they will summarize the highlights from this year’s big event.