It’s the great irony of programmatic.
The bidding is automated down to the millisecond, but the day-to-day work of running campaigns is still largely manual, from copying data between systems and reconciling reports to running QA checks and drafting explanations for clients when metrics don’t line up.
“Inside of the platforms, it’s AI everywhere – but in between, buyers are still in spreadsheets for most of the day,” said Tanja Mimica, COO and co-founder of Kovva, a new AI ad tech startup that came out of closed beta on Monday.
New AI ad tech startups are coming out of the woodwork, but Kovva is staking out a less glamorous niche than most: using agents to deal with the cross-platform chores that have mostly resisted automation.
Because, hey, the less sexy the work, the more valuable it often is.
