Agentic AI and the Future of Advertising: Why the Next Frontier Runs on Unified Data

The advertising world is changing at breakneck speed. Traditional marketing funnels are collapsing as people move from seeing an ad to buying a product in just a few interactions. AI assistants are now recommending and buying ad placements, bypassing conventional ad placements. And data is everywhere, scattered across platforms like streaming TV, retail media, and programmatic exchanges.

To thrive in this new landscape, advertisers need more than just unified data and reporting—they need a foundation that can power a new generation of AI: Agentic AI.

What’s Changing in Advertising

• Funnel compression: Media exposure, consideration, and conversion collapse into just a few interactions.
• Zero-click experiences: AI assistants recommend and transact inside their own ecosystems, bypassing conventional ad inventory.
• Signal explosion: Data is scattered across programmatic exchanges, connected TV platforms, retail media networks, and identity providers. Advertisers need more than unified data and reporting — they need orchestration.

Enter Agentic AI

Agentic AI turns advertising from a reactive process into continuous optimization. These smart, autonomous "agents" work on your behalf, making real-time decisions that were once too complex or time-consuming for humans to handle at scale.

• Campaign intelligence agents: Monitor pacing, bids, and performance across programmatic exchanges and adjust in real time.
• Audience agents: Dynamically refine segments, connected identity across channels, ensuring you're always targeting the right people.
• Creative agents: Generate, test, and scale creative variations to match audience context.
• Attribution agents: Resolve fragmented measurement across CTV, programmatic, and retail media, giving you a complete view of what's working and what isn't

But agents can’t work in isolation. They need to connect with the broader advertising stack. On their own, AI agents are only as strong as the data they run on. But to impact real advertising outcomes, they must also integrate with the platforms, exchanges, and measurement systems that matter most.

Why Unified Data and Integrations Are the Unlock

Databricks provides a unified, governed AI Agent + Lakehouse foundation. It brings all your data together in one place, lets you build highly accurate and well-governed AI agents, and integrates with the partner ecosystem built for advertising:

• Programmatic: Native integrations with DSP and SSP partners such as Magnite ensure agents can influence bidding, pacing, and allocation.

• Identity: Connections to leading ID providers/graphs such as Epsilon, Acxiom, Amperity, and Deep Sync, allow for unified audience resolution across walled gardens.

• CTV & Streaming: Data flows from connected TV platforms, like partners Samba TV, Inscape by VIZIO, and LG Ads make it possible to unify reach and frequency across linear, digital, and streaming buys.

• Measurement & Research: Partners like Samba TV, Inscape by VIZIO, and LG Ads, bring advanced incrementality testing and causal measurement directly into the Databricks environment, enriching agent feedback loops.

Learn how these partners deliver solutions for accurate audience targeting and personalized campaigns. With these integrations now available on Databricks Marketplace, Databricks doesn’t replace the advertising stack — it becomes the intelligence layer that powers it.

The Agentic AI Customer Journey

Imagine you're a marketing leader preparing for a new campaign:

Marketing Data Scientists and Marketing Campaigns leaders can use Agent Bricks to quickly create high-quality, domain-specific AI agents. By describing their marketing task and providing relevant data, Agent Bricks automatically builds and optimizes high-quality AI agents, which they can further refine as needed. Once the agents are created, here’s how they spring into action

1. Creative Refinement: Creative Agents automatically refine ad copy for a specific audience, such as Gen Z, using past performance data from Databricks.
2. Audience Segmentation: Audience Agents use target audience data from the lakehouse to create and scale a precise audience segment, such as "travel enthusiasts."
3. Campaign Activation: Your Campaign Agent obtains approval and activates the campaign, orchestrating the delivery of the segment to the correct endpoints.
4. Campaign Monitoring: The Campaign Agent continuously monitors its performance. If an ad isn't performing well, the agent automatically adjusts bids or recommends a new audience segment to the Audience Agent.
5. Fragmented Attribution: After the campaign, Attribution Agents use the unified data to resolve fragmented measurement across platforms, providing a comprehensive report on campaign effectiveness.

The Databricks Advantage

Databricks enables advertisers to build a customer 360 that brings all their data together, run continuous campaign intelligence loops, and protect brand trust with robust data governance

This open and composable approach allows you to bring the best of your partner ecosystem, from programmatic platforms to measurement specialists like Newton Research AI, into one unified data and AI foundation.

Looking Ahead

The future of advertising is no longer just about choosing between data and creativity, or between in-house and partner solutions. It’s about unifying them. With Databricks and its ecosystem of partners, advertisers can unlock both efficiency and imagination at scale.

Check out the advertising and marketing data sets and solution accelerators on Databricks Marketplace. Engage your Databricks point of contact on how to get started!