AI agents are beginning to infiltrate the advertising world

AI agents, which have been characterized as the next big thing in AI, have arrived on Madison Avenue.

At least two new startups, Adaly and Anthrologic, are pitching personalized AI tools for advertisers in the name of productivity, and through them, companies like Anthropologie are turning to the tech which claims it can help automate some tedious tasks.

Explain it to me like I’m five: AI agents function almost like AI chatbots do and can complete tasks like pulling reports, suggesting adjustments to media budgets, or crunching numbers, Tyler Pietz, CEO and founder of Anthrologic, told Marketing Brew.

“They can basically do anything that a human can do on a computer,” he claimed.

Salesforce and Microsoft have pushed AI agents, as have Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity, whose CEO, Aravind Srinivas, recently told The Economic Times that he believed merchants would soon start competing for AI agents’ attention instead of real people.

“Brands need to get comfortable doing this,” Srinivas told the Times.

Agent or agency? Both Adaly and Anthrologic are selling AI software trained and tailored to advertisers.

• Adaly, which was founded last summer, has so far raised $1.3 million in a seed round, and Hershey’s has beta-tested the tech.
• Anthrologic, founded in September and which came out of stealth mode on Wednesday, is self-funded, and it announced the retailer Anthropologie as a client when it went live.

Both companies are built on several large language models, including ChatGPT, and both respond to both voice and text prompts.

In practice, advertisers could train either company’s models on their own internal data, and then allow it to conduct some nitty-gritty tasks, Pietz explained. For example, an Anthrologic user could ask an AI agent to scan its log-level data and look for discrepancies or ask it how inflation could affect regional ad buys, Pietz said. In other words, instead of asking someone on your team or an agency partner to hunt down a spreadsheet and find a specific figure, an AI agent, which Pietz said can be set up in about a month, could presumably perform that task instead.

The tech aims to replace the grunt work of the job, Kyle Csik, co-founder of Adaly, told Marketing Brew.

“Marketers are still logging into 15 different platforms every day…when a marketer is in-housing someone, they’re hiring a person that can push the right button, right system at the right time, but not somebody that’s thinking about the broader picture,” he said. Both Csik and Pietz come from agency backgrounds, and they overlapped at the agency MediaMonks.

The targets: While Adaly is pitching to indie agencies and brands, Anthrologic is focusing specifically on brands, executives said.

Holding companies that make money by answering these sorts of questions from advertisers are already investing in their own agents. Omnicom, which is expected to merge with IPG, has its own AI agent, and through a partnership with Microsoft, Dentsu has created its own internal AI tools Dentsu DALL-E and Dentsu-GPT.

Havas is also building its own AI agent, Chief Activation Officer Mike Bregman told Marketing Brew.

By and large, he said, these tools aren’t a threat to agency jobs—yet.

“Agencies have a lot of specialization built in that a machine can’t replace today,” he said. “They can help streamline some of the budgeting process, but they’re not going to have nuance of how to work with Disney and Warner and NBC or Google and Meta.”

As is the case with most AI tools today, hallucinations are still a problem, and advertisers still might want to fact-check the outputs they’re given. Don’t take it from us—take it from the creators of some of the tools themselves.

“The reality is that we’re still in such early days, I don’t know if we can fully and confidently solve all the potential issues that can arise,” Pietz said. “Leave a human in the loop for this stuff.”