AI is now embedded across advertising operations—from trafficking and pacing to creative generation, reporting, and quality control. The question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to manage it responsibly and strategically.

This session focuses on what comes next for publisher ad ops teams: rebalancing human and machine decision-making, strengthening governance, redefining roles, and determining which AI-driven workflows should scale—and which require caution. Through candid peer discussion and practical examples, attendees will identify the operational adjustments needed to make AI sustainable, accountable, and revenue-aligned.

If your buying strategy still runs on last-click and instinct, then it’s time to plug into AI-assisted bidding, pacing and creative-media feedback loops. Learn how brands and agencies are optimizing campaigns away from the cheapest impression towards incrementality, attention and lift. Speakers will share what’s working in live campaigns and where human oversight is still needed to keep performance on track.

Publishers are being asked to do more with less data and still hit outcomes. Panelists will walk through how they’re designing consent journeys, contextual taxonomies, and first-party data products that unlock demand while staying compliant. The focus is on signaling trust to buyers in the bidstream and ensuring budgets stay unlocked. 

AI makes it easier to spin up variants and declare a winner, but early signals often over-index on novelty, placement bias, or platform-specific delivery. Marketers and agencies are testing creative across CTV, social, and programmatic video, reading fatigue curves, frequency effects, and format performance over time. But how are they tying those results back to incrementality and lift, not just short-term CTR or view-through rates? We have answers.

Curious how AI actually works in campaign planning and strategy? Stop by our AI In Action Demo blocks for fast-paced, 10-minute live showcases from leading platforms and technology partners.

Each session offers a practical look at how AI — including agentic tools — is being implemented across media planning, creative optimization, workflow automation, and measurement. These are demonstrations, not sales pitches — designed to give attendees a low-pressure way to explore capabilities, see real applications in action, and identify which solutions may be worth deeper conversations.

Drop in, discover what’s possible, and decide who you want to connect with to unlock more value in your planning strategy.

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.

Publisher ad ops can’t scale on heroic effort and late-night fire drills. Teams are wiring ad servers, analytics, and consent tools into automated workflows that surface trafficking issues, yield drift, and anomalies early — with clear logs and overrides so humans stay in control. The result: fewer revenue leaks and fewer end-of-month surprises.

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.

Marketers are using genAI to develop modular concepts, and then letting dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and multitouch attribution (MTA) decide what to serve, where, and to whom. Panelists will cover brand guardrails, approvals, and how to stitch together LLM-written copy, AI-edited video, and product feeds without creating Franken-ads that tank performance.