• by Joe Mandese , February 11, 2026

Guideline this morning unveiled a skunkworks initiative utilizing AI to enhance its data and media planning software in new and innovative ways.

The project, dubbed the “Guideline AI Factory,” is intended to accelerate the pace Guideline’s development process beyond what its human talent is capable of doing manually.

The first product is an AI-powered “Digital Placement Classification” system that will be rolled out in the early part of the second quarter, and will augment the company’s arduous human-powered system for classifying how various types of media are catagorized in Guideline’s databases and software applications.

Since launching in the U.S. as Standard Media Index, the company has built a taxonomy of about 60,000 discrete standardized media classifications powering its database.

“SMI cleansed millions of raw media codes from agency partners into more than 60,000 standardized vendor description under a unified media taxonomy,” a spokesperson confirmed, noting that it was “work that took years of human effort and advanced software at the time.”

The new AI-powered classification will build on that foundation, but take it “several layers deeper and [make] it continuously adaptable,” she said, adding, “The practical impact is speed, scale, and precision: the ability to identify, normalize, and report on new buying constructs as they emerge – we intake weekly feeds – without requiring long manual taxonomy rebuilds.”

The goal of the new product is to adapt to an increasingly dynamic marketplace of media formats, as well as “advanced targeting layers” being offered by the major digital publishers.

 “AI allows us to detect, structure, and connect those signals to spend, pricing, and impressions in near real time, rather than years multiple quarters after the fact,” she said.

Beyond the new classification system, Guideline has an AI roadmap that includes at least one other near-term “bet:” a “digital multi-metric” that will enable customers to integrate digital ad spending volume with pricing data into a single “reporting engine.”

That product, which is planned to launch by the end of the second quarter, also  is expected to introduce a third metric: explicit audience impressions.