Everyone in Ad Land wants to show off their shiny new AI agent.
But you can’t do the cool stuff unless you build the data foundation first, says Abbey Klaassen, CEO of independent performance agency Tinuiti, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
AI agents are only useful if the data feeding them is clean and connected, and that takes a lot of “unsexy” work, she says.
“Twelve months from now, I don’t think agents are going to be that hard to build and execute,” Klaassen says. “The differentiator will be the quote unquote ‘boring’ stuff.”
Tinuiti has been doing that “boring” stuff, she says, since well before agentic AI took over every conference agenda. Much of it happens inside Bliss Point, Tinuiti’s proprietary tech stack. Bliss Point started as a measurement tool, but it’s evolving into what Klaassen calls “a governed agent-enabled orchestration system.”
Or, in English, a hub where Tinuiti, its client and AI agents can all work from the same clean data, with humans signing off on what the agents do.
But rather than keeping a “human in the loop,” which has become the accepted industry parlance, Klaassen prefers the term “human as judge.” Agents do the legwork, but a person always makes the final decision.
And those decisions are only getting harder. CMOs are juggling a media mix that keeps splintering.
“Any one channel on its own isn’t that hard,” Klaassen says. “What’s hard is holding them all at once and understanding how $1 in retail media affects your CTV performance, or how creative fatigue in social shows up three weeks later in your incrementality numbers.”
That’s why it’s high time to stop optimizing for channels one at a time and to start looking at the whole picture.
“The CMO doesn’t have a Google problem or a Meta problem or a TV problem,” Klaassen says. “They have a business problem.”
Also in this episode: The hidden cost of juggling too many vendors, measuring brand and performance together, why agency compensation needs to evolve in the age of AI and what it was like going from covering agencies as a journalist at Ad Age to running one.
For more articles featuring Abbey Klaassen, click here.
