At CES 2026, marketers get serious about agentic AI, creators and retail media

Although CES is known for its shiny tech, for marketers this year’s showcase was all about execution.

The same conversations surfaced repeatedly across panels and private meetings: how agentic AI will actually buy and sell media, how retail media budgets are expanding beyond owned platforms and how creators are being treated less like influencers and more like media companies as they move past social into streaming and podcasting.

Agentic AI emerged as the buzziest topic of the week. A slate of panels and announcements focused on how AI agents could automate and optimize media transactions, including NBCUniversal revealing it is testing selling media sales with AI agents and the IAB Tech Lab releasing a roadmap for agentic buying.

Despite all the momentum at CES, Cristina Lawrence, Razorfish’s chief social and innovation officer, cautioned that agentic AI experiences “aren’t ready for prime time just yet, so we need to think of this as inevitable but incremental.”

Isabel Perry from the agency DEPT and Mandeep Bhatia from Tapestry framed agentic AI within commerce as an expansion designed to meet consumer needs and where they are already spending time — rather than a defensive response to platform shifts. OpenAI added a concrete example last fall with its Instant Checkout product, which allows users to buy directly from ChatGPT.

While agentic AI is still early, it is increasingly being viewed as a practical way of doing business.

“Agentic commerce is going to be a big topic for retail media [in 2026],” Albertsons Media Collective’s vice president of media and measurement, Liz Roche, told The Current. “How do we tackle it?”

Generative AI has helped Reddit accelerate its advertising business by narrowing the gap with legacy platforms, according to Jyoti Vaidee, the company’s vice president of monetization. Reddit’s advertising revenue jumped 74% year over year in the third quarter of 2025 to $549 million.

Now, Reddit is launching an AI-powered automated media buying tool, Max Campaigns, centered on transparency.

Reddit is positioning its automation as something advertisers can understand — showing how campaigns are optimized and why — in contrast to the opacity of black box walled gardens.

“Transparency is key for our customers to trust products built on AI,” Vaidee said. “Transparency and trust really go hand in hand.”

That focus on transparency surfaced repeatedly in conversations around automation and AI-driven buying. During a fireside chat with Terence Kawaja, the founder and CEO of Luma Partners, Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, warned that much of the industry’s growth still benefits platforms that control measurement and attribution.

“Companies are fighting to take credit for your growth instead of fighting to help you grow,” Green said. “And cheap reach, walled gardens are the best at that. They are taking credit for the growth that you would have had.”

Creators are outgrowing being influencers

Creators’ expanding role also took center stage. Influencers are no longer limited to social media; they’re breaking into streaming and podcasting as the next generation of media talent.

Because of this shift, Lionsgate’s executive vice president of digital strategy and growth, Brad Haugen, argued that the industry needs to rethink how it uses the terms “creator” and “influencer.”

“Creators are not just there to market the product, [they’re] not just there to do the internet stuff,” Haugen said during a panel. “They’re actually the next Spike Jonze or Sofia Coppola. MrBeast is a great example on Amazon. He’s the next Ryan Seacrest or whatever he wants to be.”

With this growing stature comes leverage. SiriusXM’s Lizzie Collins said that creators are becoming more selective and commanding higher fees from brands. SiriusXM itself saw a 300% increase in revenue from podcasts, according to Collins, mainly from podcasters adopting more omnichannel strategies to grow audiences.

That sophistication is also changing how media buyers access creators. Rather than relying solely on direct influencer deals, advertisers can increasingly reach creator-led audiences programmatically — buying inventory through DSPs across platforms like SiriusXM or Peacock inventory and folding creators into broader omnichannel plans.

“[Advertisers] can go buy an Alex Cooper for a really high premium and invest with her over a long period of time,” Collins said during a panel. “They can also find their same audience, maybe through a DSP strategy across the whole network.”

“I can buy that Love Island audience programmatically or I can do a Bravo PMP,” Crispin’s chief transformation officer, Freddy Dabaghi, added. “There’s six different ways I can activate that. It’s all connected.”

Retail media budgets

Retail media executives emphasized that the next phase of growth depends on expanding beyond on-site placements to capture national brand budgets. They argue that retail data should form the backbone of every media plan.

“There’s this assumption or myth that brand creativity doesn’t belong in retail media,” Kroger Precision Marketing’s Christine Foster told The Current. “That’s a fundamental miss. Purchase signal, behavioral data is incredibly powerful and should inform creative.”

Albertsons’ Roche echoed that sentiment, noting that brands and agencies willing to actively reallocate spend and test off-site activation are reaping the biggest rewards.

“At a certain point, you can harvest all of your on-site activity, but you need to keep generating that and feeding the funnel,” Roche said. “And I believe that happens in the off-site space.”

For retail data to truly scale, Foster said access must become easier — through data partnerships, cleaner integration and technology such as clean rooms.

But with larger budgets come higher expectations. While retail media networks offer closed loop measurement, brands working across multiple networks still struggle to reconcile results.

A recent Albertsons study conducted with Ovative and Northwestern found as much as a 63% difference in return on ad spend metrics between retail media networks, driven by diffrerences in methodologies, attribution and untraceable sales.

Roche signaled a desire to partner with other retail media networks to deliver better measurement consistency to advertisers.

“Getting trust and transparency are the top attributes that we bring forth for our partners,” she said. “We want them to feel confident in our results. And that means being real. That means that means the good and the bad.”

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.