• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Brands are shifting to automated and data-powered advertising strategies where agentic artificial intelligence (AI) agents will support media planning, buying, forecasting, and real-time campaign optimization.

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced this week it has begun to make improvements to its advertising technology by building-in agentic AI-based capabilities supported by Amazon Web Services.

Nage Sethu, senior vice president of technology, converged advertising and linear systems at Warner Bros. Discovery, told MediaPost in an email the platform brings together audience insights, inventory data, campaign performance metrics, forecasting systems and measurement capabilities into a unified AI-driven process, which can self-optimize campaigns.

Recommendations are based on "permissioned" data sources that maintain privacy, with the goal to improve campaign outcomes instead of targeting consumers, Sethu said.

He described how the technology provides a continuous feedback loop in order to self-optimize campaigns. “Campaign objectives enter the system, agents evaluate inventory availability, audience signals, and performance data, then make recommendations or optimizations,” he said. “As new data arrives, the agents reassess and adjust in near real time. Instead of a campaign being optimized periodically by people reviewing reports, optimization becomes a continuous, intelligent process that is always learning from the latest signals.”

When asked whether WBD had to make changes to its network to support agentic advertising, he said the transformation is less about network changes and more about modernizing the way data, decisioning and workflows operate across the advertising ecosystem.

The integration of AWS cloud infrastructure and AI services creates a foundation that he says "allows agents to access the information they need, generate insights, and automate processes while maintaining enterprise-grade security, governance, and reliability."

WBD and AWS have been working together across multiple areas of technology and media for several years, and this advertising platform is an extension of that partnership.

“This is not a one-time implementation or a finished destination, rather an online transformation,” Sethu said.

The company plans to continually evolve the platform by introducing new AI capabilities, expanding agent intelligence, and refining workflows as advertiser needs and technologies advance.

“The platform is designed to learn, adapt, and improve over time, leveraging the combined strengths of AWS in AI and cloud infrastructure and WBD's expertise in advertising, content, and audience engagement,” he said.

WBD this year had already begun rolling out a new generation of capabilities, but building on them means introducing unified media planning in the third quarter of 2026, followed by a phased rollout of composable order management, pricing, and stewardship in the fourth quarter.

The change also enables different targeting approaches that allow buyers for WBD to focus on specific brands or audience segments across linear and digital, with recommendations for inventory allocation.

It can streamline the ad-buying process to more effectively allocate budgets across multiple platforms and brands, enabling marketers to more easily work with new ad formats including interactive ads, while viewers receive more personalized ad content.