What We Built at The Foundry
A recap of AgenticAdvertising.Org's inaugural summit
What legacy will you leave behind in this industry?
That question opened The Foundry — and it wasn't rhetorical. Agentic advertising is not a trend on the horizon. It is live inside real businesses, reshaping real decisions, right now. The question is no longer whether this is happening. The question is around who shapes it and how.
The Foundry was AAO's inaugural gathering of the agentic advertising industry: an afternoon of TED Talk-caliber provocations and the kind of conversations that simply don't happen anywhere else. 150 of the industry's most forward-thinking executives - CMOs, brands, technologists, publishers, agency leaders - in a room alongside some of the world's foremost authorities on creativity, content, commerce, AI, and human cognition.
Why The Foundry — and Why Now
Advertising funds the open web. It pays for the journalism you read, the shows you stream, the apps you use for free. When it works, it connects businesses with the people they serve — and everyone benefits.
The shift to agentic AI is the most significant transformation that infrastructure has faced since programmatic was invented. Agents can find audiences, match budgets to outcomes, and execute across dozens of systems at once. A local business gets media buying intelligence that once required a six-figure agency retainer. A mid-size publisher competes for premium campaigns without a twenty-person sales team.
But speed without judgment is just fast mistakes. Without governance, agents optimize for whatever metric they're pointed at — even when that doesn't align with what a brand intended, what a publisher deserves, or what a consumer should experience.
AgenticAdvertising.org (AAO) exists to make sure humans stay in the decisions that matter. It's a nonprofit with elected boards from brands, agencies, publishers, and technology providers — equal voice, equal vote. The people who should write the standards are the people who have to live with them. The Foundry was where those people came together for the first time.
At the center of AAO's work is AdCP — the Ad Context Protocol — the common language that makes agentic advertising possible. It lets AI agents across the entire value chain discover inventory, plan campaigns, execute buys, generate creative, govern decisions, and report results across any platform, any format, any channel, without central control. Agents can't collaborate if they can't communicate. AdCP is the infrastructure that changes that.
That's what brought 150 of the industry's most senior practitioners to The Foundry: not to observe the future of agentic advertising, but to hear from world-class authorities on creativity, commerce, content, and cognition — and to start building it together.
CREATIVITY: The Future of Creativity Will Not Be Automated
Colleen DeCourcy, Chief Marketing Officer, Sonos
Colleen DeCourcy opened with a provocation that reframed the whole day: the agentic era isn't a creative revolution. It's a correction.
For forty years, the economic logic of advertising quietly moved creativity to the cheap side of the ledger. The brief sat downstream of the buy. Average work became viable because a good media plan could mask it. The loop between creative signal and media execution was wide enough to hide a lot of mediocrity.
That loop is closing. When creative and media operate as one continuous system — when signal comes back in real time — work that catches lightning gets amplified at a precision that wasn't possible before. Work that doesn't gets identified as inefficient almost immediately. Average stops being economically viable. Distinct work becomes the only durable competitive advantage.
Colleen was equally clear about the risk. The same tools that make this possible can produce infinite volumes of content that is technically competent and spiritually empty. Feed the system adequacy, and it will optimize adequacy faster.
Which puts the weight back where it has always belonged: on the brief, on the strategist finding the first true idea, on the human authorship that gets amplified. For marketers building careers in this moment, that's the optimistic read. The tools that once required a hundred-million-dollar media budget are now accessible to anyone with a genuinely good idea and the craft to express it.
Go have ideas worth amplifying.
HUMAN COGNITION: How to Be a Productive Human in a World of Intelligent Machines
Tom Griffiths, Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness and Culture, Princeton University
Tom Griffiths, cognitive scientist at Princeton University, arrived with a question that deserves to sit in every marketer's head: we are designing systems to augment human judgment at a moment when most of us have never rigorously examined what human judgment actually is.
His research offered a grounded answer — and two counterintuitive conclusions.
Evaluation over generation. Generative AI is genuinely good at producing things — ideas, copy, code, designs. What it's less good at is knowing which of those things are any good. Tom's lab ran experiments asking humans and seven AI systems to generate new product designs. On average, the AI ideas were rated as more original than the human ones. But the very best ideas still came from humans. A person who can tell good from great, paired with a system that can generate at volume, gets remarkably close to the output of your most creative human. Taste is becoming the leverage point.
Metacognition over cognition. How to break a problem down. How to assign work. What tools and people are right for which job. When Tom's lab tested teams of AI agents on collaborative coding tasks, the agents generated enormous activity and very little progress — sending each other encouraging messages, waiting for direction instead of acting. Productivity only appeared when a human stepped in to direct the team, doing the metacognition while agents executed the tasks.
As AI absorbs more of the labor and more of the cognition, humans are moving up the org chart. The skills that used to belong only to senior managers — judgment, direction-setting, knowing what to ask for and how to evaluate the answer — are now the skills everyone needs, much earlier in their careers than before.
The human role isn't fading. It's becoming more interesting.
FUTURE OF MARKETING: Agents & Change Agents: Are You Ready for the Future of Marketing?
Randall Rothenberg + Matthew Egol, Advisors, AAO
Randall Rothenberg and Matt Egol came to The Foundry with a diagnosis from their report Building the Future of Marketing - drawn from interviews with over 100 senior executives, a survey of 1,000 more, and a century of history on how tech protocols reshape industries. They shared a clear warning with the room: most organizations aren't ready.
Their argument starts with the protocol itself. Some protocols standardize how an industry already works. Others transform it. A rare few create entirely new industries that didn't exist before - HTTP being the obvious example, the protocol that didn't just improve publishing but spawned the modern digital economy. AdCP belongs in a third category. It wasn't built as a faster pipe for trading impressions. It was built to provide the foundational architecture for an ad economy where creativity and media, planning and measurement, paid and owned and earned, all operate as one connected system, rather than a linear assembly line passed between departments.
For a century, marketing ran on handoffs. Someone wrote the brief. Someone designed the layout. Someone bought the media. Someone measured the results. Agentic AI and AdCP create the conditions for that linear flow to finally collapse, transforming the marketer's role from manual execution to system design and orchestration.
Randall and Matt were precise about what this means: marketers are now tasked with building and governing dynamic experience systems where autonomous agents coordinate campaigns in real time across channels. That orchestration is itself a creative act. We talk a lot about ensuring the human isn't removed from the loop. The better frame: the human is the loop.
The transition to agentic advertising is inevitable. The question is whether your organization is designed to lead it.
CONTENT: From Visibility to Legibility: Rethinking Content in the Age of AI Discovery
Lauren Price, SVP of Marketing, COS, + Christina Cubeta, Founding Advisor, AAO
Under Lauren Price's leadership, COS was ranked #1 among global retailers for AI brand value consistency in AI-generated responses. She walked The Foundry through how her team got there — and it wasn't by spending more.
The strategy was specificity. Lauren picked one hero product - cashmere - and went deep. Category specificity paired with brand dominance is what AI rewards. She chose the place COS had the most right to win and concentrated PR, influencer, and editorial effort there.
One of the creators who moved the needle most had 10,000 subscribers and a 35-minute video on quality knitwear. Not a household name. But the fit between creator voice and brand voice did more than scale ever could, and the depth of the content gave LLMs a transcript rich enough to learn from. Two things happened at once: a real human audience found something worth watching, and the AI layer picked up signal it could use.
Christina Cubeta drew the through-line for the room: brand search volume is the single highest correlated factor to AI search visibility. Investment in brand pays off in the channels finance already cares about.
Showing up isn't enough when discovery doesn't tolerate ambiguity. What it takes now is legibility — a brand that reads the same way wherever AI happens to find it.
COMMERCE: Rewriting the Future with Agentic Commerce
Parbinder Dhariwal, VP and GM, CVS Media Exchange
CVS Media Exchange sits inside one of the most influential retail environments in the country — 144 million Americans shop CVS each year, nearly one in two, in a category where better outcomes for brands and customers is the standard.
Parbinder opened with a scene already happening in stores today: a consumer stands in an aisle, phone out, asking an AI what to buy before a sales rep even knows they're in market. Discoverability has been disrupted. The question now is desirability — and whether brands and retailers who built the old model can move fast enough to build the new one.
His argument wasn't about what AI can now do. It was about what you choose not to let it do. At CMX, accountable AI is the future, where human-in-the-loop decisioning is present for every consumer moment. That's not a limitation — it's a design choice.
The agentic era will reward efficiency. It will also reward the brands that decide, deliberately, where the human stays.
AAO BLUEPRINTS: Where the Room Went to Work
The second half of The Foundry wasn't listening — it was building. Five "Blueprint" sessions ran simultaneously with no slides, no presentations, no spectators. A Business Leader steering toward the practical. A Technical Leader grounding the conversation in what's actually buildable today. An Instigator asking the question nobody else wanted to ask. This was dense, practitioner-level conversation, with a working output that will feed directly into AAO's standard-setting work, and something every participant could bring back to their organization.
- Governed Automation
- From Trading to Stateful Investment
- Rebalancing the Open Web
- Rebuilding the Operating Model
- Creative as Protocol, Not Payload
FUTURE OF MARKETING: Don't Let It Happen to You: Why Marketers Must Own the Technology Shaping Their Future Brian O'Kelley, Founding Architect, AAO
Brian O'Kelley helped build the infrastructure of the last era of advertising. He watched marketers step back from the technology. He watched the technology move forward without them. He closed The Foundry with a charge.
The AI you are using today is the worst AI you will ever use for the rest of your life. By his estimate, the quality of agentic coding today versus one year ago is already 20-50x better. Very few things in this world get 50 times better over the course of 12 months. Most people in the room remember what 1996 felt like from the inside — the sense that something enormous was beginning. That's the moment we're in again. New models, new agent capabilities, new tools rolling out while most of the industry is still figuring out what to make of the last batch.
That's the urgency underneath what AAO is building. The future of agentic advertising is being shaped right now, by the people choosing to show up and work on it. The longer you wait to be part of that conversation, the more of it gets decided without you.
If we let it happen to us, we won't like the outcome. We need to shape this future together.
The Moment the Industry Woke Up
Something shifted in that room - like when a critical mass of brilliant people look at the same reality and recognize it for what it is. Agentic advertising is here. It is live. It is consequential. And the leaders forging its future showed up together for the first time.
The Foundry was the moment an industry stopped debating whether agentic was coming and started deciding what it would become. The Blueprint outputs feed directly into AAO's standard-setting work. The working groups are live. The protocol is on GitHub, public and auditable, built by the community that has to live with it.
The ideas in that room will compound. The members of AAO will shape how advertising is bought, sold, and measured for the next decade. The legacy question from the opening wasn't rhetorical — it was the entire point.
This is your industry to shape.
AgenticAdvertising.Org is the nonprofit organization shaping how AI and advertising work together — for consumers, businesses, and the people who create the content we all depend on. Learn more about our mission and the community of builders shaping the Cre(ai)tive Economy. And take a seat at the table where the standards are written: become a member of AgenticAdvertising.Org today.
📺 Watch the sessions: Watch full session clips and our sizzle reel.
📷 Photos from The Foundry: Explore the selects from the afternoon.