Our Insights

If you've sat through an ad-tech conference or a platform webinar this year, you've heard the phrase everywhere: agentic AI. Every major platform is racing to tell you their AI doesn't just optimize your campaigns anymore — it acts on your behalf. It sets strategy. It reallocates budget. It makes the call. Welcome to the age of agentic media buying.

At Lewis Media, we get asked about this constantly, so let's untangle it: what agentic media buying actually is, why it's suddenly everywhere, and why we think the agencies that will be most successful in this next chapter are the ones that keep a human firmly in control even when utilizing AI in media planning.

What "agentic" actually means

Automation isn't new to media buying — bid algorithms and rules-based optimization have been part of the toolkit for years. What's different about agentic systems is that they don't just execute rules you set forth; they pursue a goal. Give an agentic system an objective, say, "drive qualified leads at this cost" and it can independently plan the steps, shift spend across channels and formats, adjust targeting, and even negotiate and execute the buy, often with minimal human sign-off along the way.

You're seeing these types of “agents” in real products right now, from AI in programmatic advertising to AI in paid social. In August, The Trade Desk introduced Kokai Zuma, the latest release of its Kokai platform, which brings agentic AI features, powered by its Koa AI, into campaign creation, audience building, and frequency optimization. The company reports an average 32% improvement in Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) performance in early testing. As with any vendor-reported number, we'd want to see it hold up in your campaigns before taking it at face value. Other major platforms are pushing their own automated campaign tools in the same direction. This isn't a future-of-advertising thought experiment anymore — it's a part of media planning today.

Why the industry is leaning in

The research backs up what we're hearing from clients and platform reps alike. IAB's 2026 Outlook found that AI dominates buyer priorities this year, with five of the top six buyer focus areas being AI-related. Marketers want speed, scale, and the ability to manage increasingly fragmented channels without proportionally growing headcount — and agentic tools promise exactly that.

Separately, a BCG and Google study found that 81% of marketers want integrated capabilities across paid, owned, earned, and commerce, not channel-by-channel silos. Agentic tools are becoming a piece of how that kind of orchestration happens.

The catch nobody's fully solved

The one thing the industry is still working out is governance. The tools are powerful, but there's no settled standard yet for how they explain their decisions or how much human oversight they should have. That's an open question, and it's one we think every advertiser should be asking their agency.

When an algorithm shifts your budget between channels in real time, who's checking that it's still aligned with your actual business goals — not just the metric it was told to chase? Who's making sure a brand-safety issue or a bad creative doesn't scale before a human notices? That's not a knock on the technology; it's just the honest state of where the industry is right now.

Where we come down on it

At Lewis Media, we're tech enabled by design — we invest in the platforms and data infrastructure to use tools like this well. But we're human first by principle, and that's not just a value statement for us; it's the actual answer to the governance gap above. Agentic systems are excellent at execution at scale. They're not a substitute for someone who knows your business, understands what "success" actually means for your brand, and is willing to override the algorithm when it's optimizing for the wrong thing.

So, we treat agentic media buying the way we treat every new platform capability: we adopt what earns its place, we keep a person accountable for every dollar, and we stay honest with our clients about what the technology can and can't yet be trusted to do on its own.

If you're trying to figure out where agentic tools fit into your media strategy — and where they don't — let's start a conversation.

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Sources

• The Trade Desk, The Trade Desk Introduces Kokai Zuma, the Latest Release of Kokai (August 27, 2026)
• IAB, 2026 Outlook: A Snapshot of U.S. Ad Spend, Opportunities, and Strategies for Growth (January 2026)
• BCG and Google, marketing partnerships study (2026)