AI is transforming advertising. Just not where it matters.

Every major platform, protocol and infrastructure vendor in advertising is racing to embed AI. The investment is massive, the ambition is genuine, and the pace of change is only accelerating. But if you look honestly at where most of that energy is directed, a pointed question emerges: who, exactly, is this for? 

Brands and their agency partners share one objective: advertising that works. That means awareness, affinity and purchase intent compounding into category leadership. Right now, too much of the industry’s AI investment optimizes for the infrastructure surrounding that goal, rather than the goal itself. 

The same race, just at a faster pace 

The first wave of AI in advertising is delivering real operational and creative efficiencies, and the investment is accelerating. Look no further than Publicis’s $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp, announced last month. Publicis’ CEO, Arthur Sadoun, framed it explicitly around “empowering clients to generate new, exclusive and proprietary data.” That is AI investment pointed at brand outcomes. Anything that moves in that direction is worth supporting. 

The second wave—agentic buying and selling—demands more scrutiny. IAB Tech Lab introduced its Agentic Advertising Management Protocols in late 2025, a separate coalition launched AdCP, and the first confirmed agent-to-agent media buy has already been executed. The direction of travel is clear. 

These protocols are designed by and for the supply chain: exchanges, platforms and infrastructure vendors whose economics depend on transaction volume. AI agents operating on today’s bid stream will make faster decisions, but in service of the same objectives that have always driven programmatic: impression volume, cost efficiency and attribution proxies. For brands trying to build genuine consumer connections, that is not a breakthrough. It is the same race, run at a faster pace.

The capability to answer the mindset question already exists. What’s been missing is an industry willing to build its AI investment around it, rather than around the infrastructure that surrounds it.

This dynamic is not new. When programmatic scaled, it promised precision and efficiency. What it delivered was a system optimized for cost-per-impression and last-touch attribution, and an ecosystem of costly workarounds that emerged because the original infrastructure was never built around advertiser objectives. The risk is that AI amplifies the mistakes of the past and succeeds at the wrong thing. The question is whether that transformation finally centers brand outcomes, or once again optimizes for the needs of the ecosystem around them. 

The shift that keeps getting deferred 

The most telling signal of where advertising needs to go is not coming from ad tech. It is coming from everywhere else. The industry must understand real-time consumer mindset, which will enable brands to meet customers in the right moments with the right message. 

OpenAI launched its ads pilot in ChatGPT with a simple promise: reach people in the moments that matter, as they explore options, compare choices and make decisions. WPP Media published a framework this year built entirely around moments of need, arguing that the brands winning are those that show up at the precise inflection point where a consumer’s latent need surfaces. The Weather Company has built an advertising proposition around weather-driven mindset shifts and their measurable impact on purchase behavior. Even Uber’s advertising chief invoked consumer mindset at CES earlier this year, a sign the concept is gaining traction well beyond ad tech. 

What these have in common is a shift in emphasis: from who the audience is to what state they are in. Consumer mindset in a specific moment is the variable that has always determined whether advertising works.  

Consider a single person over the course of one day: at 7 AM, scanning financial news on their phone, analytical and focused. By noon, streaming video over lunch, relaxed and open. That evening, deep in a sports livestream on the couch, emotionally charged. Same person. Same audience segment. Three completely different mindsets, and three completely different advertising opportunities. 

The industry spent two decades building infrastructure around who someone is. The harder, more valuable questions of “What mindset are they in right now?” and “Will this message land?” have never been adequately answered at scale.  

The right question for this moment 

AI will keep making the ecosystem faster. That progress is welcome. But speed applied to the wrong objective compounds the problem, rather than solving it. Will the industry deploy AI to reach consumers at the right moment, rather than just speed up the adoption of the tech?

While audience segments describe who someone was at the time data was collected, their current mindset is a different question entirely, and one the current wave of agentic infrastructure is not designed to answer.

But if our industry does not ask this question now, we will spend the next decade cleaning up a faster version of the same mess.

The next era of advertising will not be won by speed alone. It will be won by those that remember the humans at the heart of it and can find the moments in which they’re most open to act. That question is why some of us got into this business, and why the answer has to be at the center of where AI goes next. 

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.