AI is moving through advertising faster than the industry’s old workflow diagrams can keep up. The immediate change is obvious: software can automate more of the work involved in planning, placing and optimizing campaigns. The more consequential change is harder to see. The industry is beginning to compete over who gets to make the decisions.
Digiday’s report from LUMA Partners’ Digital Marketing Summit captures the shift through two connected arguments. AI is changing how advertising decisions are made inside the media system, while AI assistants are changing how consumers discover, compare and buy products outside it.
The workflow is becoming less valuable
Conor McKenna, a partner at LUMA Partners, told the event that “the workflow moat begins to evaporate” as AI makes previously complex processes easier to automate. That matters because much of ad tech has historically competed on the ability to manage those processes: campaign setup, delivery, optimization and reporting.
If more of that work becomes accessible through software, operational expertise stops being enough of a differentiator. The advantage moves toward the quality of the decisions made in real time: which signals matter, which creative should appear, where an ad should run and how the system should respond when performance changes.
Terry Kawaja, LUMA’s CEO, drew the sharper distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency may deliver a 10% improvement, he argued, while effectiveness can produce a 10x difference. That is a useful way to understand the next phase of ad tech. Automating the process is no longer the whole prize. The bigger prize is deciding better than everyone else.
That puts demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, agencies, retail media networks and major platforms into a more direct contest over advertising intelligence. The question is no longer simply who can execute a media plan. It is who owns the signals and judgment that shape the plan in the first place.
The buying journey is becoming an AI interface
The consumer-side shift may be even more disruptive. AI assistants could bring research, product discovery and comparison into one interface, compressing the traditional path from awareness to purchase. People may still make the final decision, but they will increasingly delegate parts of the process to systems that can search, filter and recommend on their behalf.
That creates a new advertising problem. In a conventional media environment, brands compete for attention across identifiable placements and platforms. In an AI-mediated environment, they may also compete to be selected by a system that controls the conversation before a person reaches a product page.
Trust becomes part of the media value. An assistant that recommends a product is not simply showing an ad. It is influencing the reasoning around the purchase. If consumers cannot tell whether a recommendation reflects relevance, payment, data access or platform preference, the interface will quickly become less useful.
There is also a measurement problem. Ravi Patel, cofounder and CEO of SWYM.ai, told Digiday that unified media platforms may manage the “what” and the “how much,” but not necessarily the “which impression.” That distinction matters because impression-level decisions remain where targeting, pricing, context and delivery meet. A system can unify budgets without unifying the intelligence that determines each opportunity.
This is why AI will not automatically make advertising simpler. It may make the visible workflow simpler while pushing the important decisions deeper into systems that are harder for advertisers and consumers to inspect. Ana Milicevic of Sparrow Advisers described the direction as outsourcing the “brain” of the process to a collection of agents.
For brands, the strategic consequence is direct: access to an AI buying interface will matter less than earning a place in its decision logic. Better automation may reduce the cost of running campaigns, but it will not solve the harder questions of signal quality, attribution, effectiveness and trust. The next fight in ad tech is not over who can move the budget fastest. It is over who gets to decide where that budget goes, and why.