Agents of Change: The Architecture of Trust in an Agentic Era
Across three thematic episodes from our Agents of Change podcast series, we asked ten leaders from across the ecosystem the questions cutting to the core of media's rapid transformation: where do you already trust an autonomous agent today, where do you strictly demand a human in the loop, and what does the advertising org chart look like in 2036?
The answers did not sound like hype or cautious theory. Across buy-side, sell-side, verification, infrastructure, and creative platforms, the consensus arrived in unison: agentic advertising is operating in production right now, and its sustainability relies entirely on Embedded Human Judgment.
As we wrap our Agents of Change series, here is what ten pioneers building the rails of the new media economy told us on the ground, and why their perspectives chart the blueprint for what comes next.
Phase 1: The New Rails in Production
Where autonomous workflows are already transacting, coding, and scaling. The shift away from legacy pipes is happening from the ground up, built on open protocols like the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) and modern agentic engineering.
Watch Ben Williams (Founder & Managing Director, Kiln): As an agentic coder building early AdCP integrations across trusted SaaS stacks, Williams highlighted how open protocols eliminate the "ad tech tax" of opaque intermediaries. By returning margins to publishers and broadcasters, agentic architecture protects quality journalism and prevents the spread of "AI slop".
Watch Gabriel DeWitt (Head of Publisher Platform Monetization, Yahoo): Proving that agentic commerce is active today, DeWitt detailed live production campaigns run with major holding companies. Yahoo's "agentic direct" framework automates insertion orders publisher-to-buyer via AdCP while anchoring pricing firmly against internal rate-card rules and protecting proprietary user graphs.
Watch Brian O'Kelley (Co-Founder & CEO, Scope3): Having built programmatic's early foundations, O'Kelley now orchestrates 15 to 20 agentic coding, QA, and documentation tasks simultaneously. Comparing the industry's legacy stack to running "Windows 95 in 2026," he argues that agents finally clear the 50% programmatic waste by enabling objective-driven campaign execution.
Phase 2: Creative, Context, and Customer Safety
Where scale demands deeper guardrails and strategic rigor. As agents move into direct client execution and creative delivery, trust isn't assumed—it is governed through clear parameters.
Watch Matic Tribuson (Chief Product Officer, Celtra): While autonomous agents excel at absorbing mechanical ad ops workflows, creative execution presents unique challenges. Tribuson highlighted that agentic systems do not generate new problems out of nowhere; they expose existing cracks in brand guidelines and review pipelines. In dynamic AdCP-driven environments — where buyer and publisher agents negotiate multi-channel, high-impact creative options in milliseconds — having disciplined, human-led creative guardrails and risk thresholds in place ensures automation never outpaces brand safety.
Watch Priti Ohri (CEO & Co-Founder, Advertible): Advertible actively deploys agents across marketing, coding, and production software. Ohri laid out the foundational rule of autonomous agency: you never hand your core IP to an agent. The system must always be blueprinted and architected by engineering first.
Watch Pamela Slea (CEO, Boltive): Boltive leverages autonomous agents to monitor data privacy and consent compliance across hundreds of thousands of sites jurisdiction by jurisdiction. For Slea, the real question for teams gaining AI efficiency is strategic: using time saved to elevate the final product and customer experience rather than just churning out faster outputs.
Watch Sarah Acker (SVP of Marketing, HUMAN Security): With AI agents now representing both automated visitors and genuine customers, Acker demonstrated that agentic visibility must precede agentic execution. After HUMAN rebuilt its own brand identity using machine-generated imagery, she emphasized that the modern challenge isn't blocking every bot - it's establishing clear visibility between good and bad actors.
Phase 3: Embedded Human Judgment
Why the next decade belongs to dreamers, orchestrators, and governance. The throughline across every interview was unanimous: human involvement is not for post-campaign review. It must be designed into the architecture from day one.
Watch Chinmayi Bettadapur (VP & GM, Media & Entertainment, Salesforce): While agents are unlocking rapid product prototyping and roadmap acceleration, Bettadapur noted that critical fact-checking remains firmly human. For now, we are often "agents in the loop" evaluating human priorities until trust is systematically proven.
Watch Mike Chevallier (SVP, Advanced Audio & Data Revenue, iHeartMedia): As iHeart modernizes broadcast planning and streaming transactions via agentic endpoints, Chevallier balances technical speed with consumer sentiment. With listeners demanding human authenticity, he outlined the non-negotiable human-in-the-loop test: Fit, Money, and Law.
Watch Benjamin Masse (President, AgenticAdvertising.org & CPO, Triton Digital): Masse crystallized the philosophy uniting AAO's mission: Embedded Human Judgment (EHJ). Moving past reactionary checks, which he compares to letting kids break a lamp and reporting it afterward, EHJ architects constraints, budgets, and policy directly into protocol interactions so agents never run unsupervised.
From Form-Fillers to Dreamers: The 2036 Horizon
When asked what advertising looks like in ten years, no one mourned the mechanics of the past. The jobs that disappear are the stopgaps built to service clunky legacy software: manual trafficking, copying numbers between ad servers, pulling static reports, and endless form-filling.
The jobs emerging require what no model can generate in isolation: context, orchestration, strategic courage, and taste. Whether named Agent Orchestrators, AI Czars, or Dreamers, the future belongs to those who build the governance to let agents move fast while reserving human critical thinking for the big, non-linear bets.
That is the standard AgenticAdvertising.org was created to build.
Explore the Full Series & Join the Movement
- Watch: Catch up on the complete Agents of Change Cannes Lions Playlist to stream every individual interview.
- Go Deeper: Download AAO's whitepaper, Building the Future of Marketing, and explore the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP).
- Get Involved: Become an AAO Member today to help shape open, trusted standards for agentic media.
The Agents of Change interview series, recorded on the Croisette at Cannes Lions 2026. Produced in partnership with AgenticAdvertising.org. Sponsored by Agnitio.