AI Is Finally Doing Real Work In Ad Ops (But Only When It Works With Your Existing Tech) | AdExchanger

Thursday, May 21st, 2026 – 12:02 pm

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For all the AI-in-ad-ops talk, plenty of publisher teams are still trapped in the grind of pulling GAM reports by hand and trying to reverse engineer why revenue dropped.

At Programmatic AI in Las Vegas, Jordan Cauley, who launched a publisher monetization tech consultancy after an eight-plus-year stint as a product lead at Mediavine, made a simple argument that large language models only help with the ad tech grind when they plug directly into systems publishers already use. For instance, Google Ad Manager (GAM), GitHub and revenue reconciliation feeds.

Cauley aimed his session squarely at publisher ad ops and product teams who want AI to take real work off their plates. His examples were all grounded in day-to-day tasks like diagnosing revenue dips, unpacking the impact of Prebid software updates and reconciling SSP discrepancies without losing days in GAM.