Agents of Change: Human in the Loop

Arthur Larrey, co-founder and CEO of Audion, joins Agents of Change at the Advertising Economic Forum during Advertising Week NY 2026, about six weeks after moving to New York to lead Audion's US launch. Audion is an AI audio advertising platform built to make audio accountable and tie it to real outcomes. Arthur shares what surprised him about how Americans buy audio, why one of the oldest me...

Peyman Nilforoush, co-founder and CEO of inPowered AI, joins Agents of Change at the Advertising Economic Forum, fresh off launching DecisioningOS with PMG. inPowered runs AI decisioning on the sell side, inside the major SSPs. Peyman explains why that intelligence is moving into the exchange, how running models in a container lets them see the full exchange instead of a throttled slice, and why t...

Max Kalehoff, CEO of Adverteyes, joins Agents of Change at the Advertising Economic Forum during Advertising Week NY 2026, almost a year after spinning the company out of Realeyes. Adverteyes connects creative with sales outcomes. It has watched nearly 20 million people in 90 countries respond to ads and turned that human data into a model that predicts which creative will drive sales. Max explain...

Jeremy Flynn, EVP and Head of Product at Horizon Media, joins Agents of Change: Human in the Loop at the Advertising Economic Forum during Advertising Week New York 2026. Jeremy oversees Blu, Horizon’s AI-native platform, and came to Horizon to build technology that makes the CMO the CFO’s best friend. We talk about why advertising should run as disciplined as financial services, how Blu brings au...

Bill Wise, CEO of Mediaocean, sits down with Agents of Change at the Advertising Economic Forum during Advertising Week NY 2026. Bill treats AI as an inflection point on the scale of the early internet. We talk about why Mediaocean launched a venture arm to back AI startups and how AI becomes the orchestration layer across ad tech. He explains Nivo, Mediaocean’s AI platform, and how it moves from...

Gina Cavallo, CRO at xpln.ai, joins Agents of Change at the Advertising Economic Forum during Advertising Week NY 2026 to talk about why attention is finally getting real as a metric, and the link between creative and media that most measurement stacks miss. Gina explains what brands actually do once they see attention data on a live campaign, and uses a Levi’s example to show how an impression ge...

Andrew Mole, CEO and founder of pubX, came straight off the stage at the Advertising Economic Forum to sit down with Agents of Change. pubX builds agent to agent infrastructure for advertising, and Andrew isn’t interested in patching programmatic. He wants to rebuild the economics from the ground up so more money reaches publishers and advertisers get higher quality media. Fresh off announcing a $...

Identity is technically solved. Adoption isn’t. Mathieu Roche, co-founder and CEO of ID5, joins Agents of Change at the Advertising Economic Forum to talk about why identity works like a currency, and why the industry still hasn’t agreed to trade on it. We get into what an unknown user is actually worth on the open web (his answer: nothing), why the publisher belongs in the driver’s seat, and what...

The average enterprise licenses 80 to 120 platforms, and only about 17% of them actually talk to each other. Bob Walczak, CEO and founder of MadConnect, joins Agents of Change at the Advertising Economic Forum to talk about why connectivity has been ad tech’s oldest unsolved problem, and why AI makes it urgent. Bob explains why most companies end up with patchwork connectors built in house, what c...

Minutes before the doors opened at Horizon Media, I sat down with Tom Triscari, co-founder of the Advertising Economic Forum, to talk about why this industry needs more economics talk and less tech talk. Tom’s case is simple. Supply and demand, price times quantity, revenue minus cost. The mix changes, but the fundamentals never do, and they’re how he cuts through the noise. We also get into the o...

Glen Caruso, president of The Digital Curators and creator of DecisionLab AI, spent three decades at Adobe, Oracle Data Cloud, and Microsoft before turning to teaching companies how to put AI to work, not just buy it. We get into how he takes one painful workflow at a time, why guardrails come before anything else, and how to keep what your best people know from walking out the door when they leav...

Joe Luchs, Founder and CEO of Datalinx AI, joins Agents of Change to explain why he calls his company an "AI data refinery," using the analogy of crude oil needing to be refined into gas before it can fuel your car, and why he thinks the biggest lie in AI right now is that good tools can replace good data. Joe walks through a real case study with LiveRamp, where Datalinx took a data-onbo...

We wrap our Hot Takes on the Croisette series with Matic Tribušon, Chief Product Officer at Celtra, on one of the toughest workflows to hand over to agents: creative. Recorded café-side in Cannes, lunch rush and all. Matic argues that agentic AI doesn't change what good creative requires — it just makes weak brand guidelines and loose review processes break faster. He walks through how Celtra...

Where is Salesforce actually trusting agents with work today? On this episode of Agents of Change, we sit down with Chinmayi Bettadapur, VP and General Manager for Agentforce Media at Salesforce, to talk about building agents that meet the real needs of media and entertainment companies. Chinmayi shares how agents are fast-tracking her own product and engineering teams — letting them prototype and...

Where do you actually trust an AI agent today — and where do you still hold the line? On this episode of Agents of Change, we sit down with Ben Williams, Founder and Managing Director of Kiln, a technology agency focused on the media sector, to talk trust, governance, and what AdCP means for the future of ad tech. Ben shares where agents already run autonomously in his own agency (platform integra...

At Cannes Lions, I sat down with Priti Ohri, CEO & Co-Founder of Advertible, to discuss what agentic AI actually looks like inside a growing advertising business. Rather than replacing people, Priti shares how her team is using AI agents to eliminate busy work, amplify creative at scale, and free humans to focus on higher-value strategic thinking. She also explains why trust and governance rem...

What happens to brand safety when an AI agent, not a human, writes the ad? On this episode of Agents of Change, we sit down with Pamela Slea, CEO of Boltive, an ad security and privacy technology company building the guardrails that let buy-side and sell-side agents transact at scale. We talk about where Boltive is already trusting agents in production (hint: privacy compliance monitoring across h...

Everyone wants an agent strategy. But according to Sarah Acker of HUMAN, that strategy must begin with visibility. As bots and AI agents account for a growing share of internet activity, businesses need to understand which agents are legitimate, which are malicious and which may be acting as customers on behalf of real people. In this episode of 2026 Hot Takes on the Croisette, Sarah and Aubriana...

Programmatic advertising is running on an operating system built 20 years ago. Brian O’Kelley thinks it is time for a rebuild. The Scope3 co-founder and CEO joins Aubriana Alvarez Lopez on the Cannes Croisette to discuss AI agents, the hidden incentives preserving programmatic waste, where humans still matter and why advertising’s future belongs to dreamers. Part of our 2026 Hot Takes on the Crois...

What does “Guaranteed Human” mean when agents begin planning, buying and executing media? Live from Cannes Lions, Mike Chevalier of iHeart joins Aubriana Alvarez Lopez to discuss how iHeart is modernizing sales with agentic AI across broadcast radio, podcasts and streaming. They explore where agents can operate, where human oversight is nonnegotiable and why governance ultimately comes down to thr...

Yahoo isn’t just experimenting with agentic advertising. It has already run production campaigns using buyer and seller agents—including one executed with zero humans in the loop. In this episode of Agents of Change: Human in the Loop, Gabriel DeWitt, Head of Monetization at Yahoo, explains how agentic direct is transforming the publisher-to-buyer workflow through the Advertising Context Protocol...

At Cannes Lions 2026, Aubriana sits down with Ben Masse, Chief Product Officer at Triton Digital (an iHeart company) and inaugural President of the Agentic Advertising Organization, for a rapid-fire conversation about where agentic AI is already creating value—and where humans must remain firmly in the loop. Ben shares why his teams already rely on AI agents for software development, why advertisi...

What does "performance" really mean when every brand claims it? Aubriana sits down with Matthew Fanelli, CRO of Digital Remedy, to unpack 25 years of ad tech evolution — from AOL dial-up to AI-powered media. They get into fragmentation, the courage it takes to have honest conversations about what's actually working, where AI helps (and where it falls flat), and why the best marketers...

What does it actually take to stay relevant through 15+ years of nonstop change in adtech? In this episode of Agents of Change: Human in the Loop, Aubriana sits down with Patrick Shea, Co-Founder of AdDaptive Intelligence, to unpack what most companies get wrong about AI, experimentation, and long-term bets. Patrick has built through every major wave—from early programmatic to machine learning to...

In this episode of Agents of Change, Aubriana sits down with Kim Siler, a seasoned operator who has spent over two decades leading digital transformation across companies like Coca-Cola, AT&T, and TeleSign. Now co-founder of Aethova, Kim brings a rare perspective that blends enterprise execution with hands-on AI system building. The conversation cuts through surface-level AI hype to explore wh...