He made that clear on Wednesday (August 6) when he hosted a live Spaces alongside senior engineering, product and brand safety staff, who all tried to sketch out the platform’s future. At the center of it all is Grok, the in-house AI assistant Musk sees as key to X’s next act — and appeal to marketers. 

The hope is that Grok will eventually automate all advertising on the platform. But for now, that ambition is concentrated in three areas: using Grok to assess content for brand safety, tailoring product recommendations based on user behavior, and rolling out Grok-powered tools in the ad manager to streamlining creative production and campaign optimization. It’s early days, but the direction is set. Musk wants Grok to replace the media buyer, the strategist and account manager — all in one.

“Grok is good enough that you should be able to upload an ad and do nothing else,” said Musk. “Grok will figure out everything from there. You don’t need to do anything at all.”

He called it “magic”. And like any magic trick, there is a bit of technical sleight of hand behind the curtain. In Musk’s words, it works by matching “a bunch of numbers called vectors” tied to content on X with “user vectors” — a simplified, if vague, attempt to explain how Grok is supposed to make the whole thing run on autopilot.

“The longer the ad is in the system the better it will match,” said Musk. “It will automatically find its way to the best match — that’s how it works. And over time it will be the best way to advertise. Nothing will be able to beat it.”

Until then, more incremental updates are on the way. Musk noted that targeting for video ads will improve as a new AI training model comes online. Meanwhile, advertisers can now optimize for clicks, conversions and app installs within X’s immersive video viewer — the full-screen format that expands with a single tap inside the app.  

“We are heavily leaning into short-form video as one of the formats available for advertisers and in the main feed,” said Roman Grachev, who leads the advertising engineering team, on the call. 

And with that shift comes a new layer of AI-driven judgement. Grachev said that Grok is now evaluating ads based on how good they look. Each ad will receive an “aesthetic score” tied to its adherence to updated creative guidelines. The better the score, the lower the cost — and the greater chance the ad lands in prime spot in users’ feeds. 

But Musk’s ambitions go beyond prettier ads. He’s clearly angling for more performance-driven outcomes — specifically, getting users to buy directly from the app. That they aren’t already is “quite remarkable,” he said, citing (without evidence) that X has the “wealthiest and “most influential” audience in the world. 

Which helps explain the push behind product recommendations. Nail that, and Musk sees a straight line between scroll and sale. Never mind that social commerce has yet to meaningfully take hold in Western markets. 

“We’re actually now finally showing people ads that meet their interests, and that ad targeting will be dramatically better as time goes as we further leverage the Grok AI to match advertising to people who want to purchase that product or be interested in that company,” said Musk. 

These comments marked Musk’s first major public overture to advertisers since CEO Yaccarino’s exit last month. And so far, it looked more like a continuation than a reset, with Musk picking up where Yaccarino left off: focusing on using AI to grow ad revenue by expanding the long tail of advertisers. 

Whether marketers are ready to buy into this vision for X remains to be seen. His relationship with Madison Avenue is still shaky, after all. Even so, the Spaces drew a crowd. Senior marketers from Lower’s, Uber, Shark Ninja and Kina tuned in and asked questions. Unsurprisingly, brand safety kept coming up. And just as unsurprisingly, X’s response was the same as it always has been: it takes the issue seriously –serious enough, apparently, for marketers comfortable with chaos. 

But to be fair, there seem to be more of those marketers lately. X’s ad revenue is expected to climb 16.5% this year, hitting $2.26 billion, according to eMarketer. That’s still a far cry from the $4.14 billion it pulled in back in 2022, when Musk took over. So it’s less a rebound and more a recalibration –all of it playing out against a backdrop where Musk has sued advertisers for pulling spend, reportedly threatened others for even considering and continues to test just how far the industry is willing to bend to stay on his platform.