By Krystal Scanlon • May 18, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
The Trade Desk has a long history of AI ambition and a more complicated history of AI delivery. Its latest effort is notably smaller in scope and notably harder to argue with.
The ad tech company is currently talking to agency execs about its new agentic capabilities, which it calls Koa Agents, that automate significant chunks of the programmatic workflow. The system is built to connect with whatever AI model a partner is using — including Anthropic’s Claude — through an interoperability layer called Open Agentic Kit.
According to one agency exec familiar with those conversations, a workflow built on Claude that connects to the platform can ingest a media plan, reformat it into a template that’s compatible with the ad tech vendor’s system and then build the campaign. From there, it can troubleshoot creative issues and generate recommendations on what to do next including the reasoning behind such suggestions.
