An advertising and marketing expert argues
that artificial intelligence (AI) will interrupt basic programmatic advertising platform functions if not rewritten, based on its original automated processes.
Ari Paparo, founder and CEO of Marketecture Media, in a blog post explains that integrating AI throughout
the creative, planning, execution, and measurement process will "be transformative, and will significantly benefit parties that control the entire process and collect data."
He points
to Google and Meta as examples. But he says that without the "feedback loop of a complete media execution it will be out competed by larger data panopticons."
Today's demand-side
platform (DSP) represents a complex platform that requires sophisticated features to support ad serving, creative management, data management, reporting, attribution, and fraud detection at millions
of transactions per second. AI, however, threatens this model.
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It's difficult to believe that AI will not be better than humans at campaign setup and
targeting, Paparo wrote in his Marketecture newsletter, according to PPC Land. The prediction aligns with broader industry trends toward AI automation.
Microsoft in May 2025 announced plans to shutter its DSP. The advertising division informed clients
that the ad-tech unit would align with the company's AI priorities. The outdated technology in its DSP would no longer work.
Microsoft Advertising Vice President Kya Sainsbury-Carter cited
incompatibility between traditional DSP models and their vision for "conversational, personalized, and agentic" advertising futures.
Invest -- formerly known as Xandr
DSP and before that, AppNexus -- will shut down by March 2026, the company explained in a blog post.
Microsoft Monetize, the supply-side platform (SSP) and publisher of ad technology,
will remain intact.
Paparo, an ad expert and co-founder of companies like Beeswax, an ad-tech platform that created the industry's first Bidder-as-a-Service, said the threat comes from
agentic AI. He
writes that this is because "Agentic AI agents (is that redundant?), do the targeting and
optimization for the client, and more so, do so within any touch point the client desires."
AI agentic models will make media-mix models more important.
"The digital market is getting more
fragmented every day, making the centralized role of the DSP harder and harder to maintain," Paparo writes. "Cross-media measurement (MMM, etc) is more important than single channel optimization."
An Agentic agent can theoretically be deployed in multiple ways within a fragmented media environment, especially since it is less problematic for privacy and data movement compared with the
traditional DSP model, he wrote.