As more brands, agencies, and media companies join in on the AI chorus of “better, faster, smarter,” the teams administering AI tools are singing a dissonant tune — managing a growing stack of AI-powered tools layered across planning, activation, measurement, reporting, and workflow management. It’s a familiar irony to anyone in advertising: Another innovation designed to make the ecosystem easier is instead creating more systems, more interfaces, more costs, and more operational complexity.
Last month at AdExchanger’s Programmatic AI 2026 event, Mike Rhodes, Director, Customer Engineering at Google Cloud, and Eoin Townsend, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Cadent tackled this irony — that the tools that promise efficiency and simplicity instead make day-to-day operations more difficult. The two leaders shared the stage and shared their vision for the next phase of AI that won’t be defined by bigger models or more assistants, but by how effectively organizations connect intelligence across systems, teams and workflows.
“What the industry doesn’t need is another AI product,” Rhodes said during the session. “The market is moving away from point solutions and toward the integration and orchestration of many different agents and workflows.”
