New Delhi: Artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape the way media campaigns are planned and executed. New agentic AI systems are capable of planning, buying and optimising campaigns in near real time. Industry leaders say this shift could reduce campaign setup timelines from days to minutes and push agencies to rethink how their teams work.
At a session titled Agentic Media Buying, From Brief to Bid in Seconds, Sudipto Das, VP Advertiser Solutions APAC at PubMatic, and Rajiv Rajagopal, Head of Advanced TV at WPP Media, discussed how AI agents are starting to automate several parts of the media buying process. This includes campaign setup, optimisation and performance analysis.
Rajagopal opened the discussion by acknowledging the irony of an agency leader speaking about a technology that could potentially disrupt the agency ecosystem itself.
“I think it’s a bit of irony here that I represent the agency and we are going to talk about a topic which is going to be probably a large part of the agency ecosystem,” he said.
He however added that AI will mainly challenge companies that resist change rather than those that adapt.
“I think definitely one aspect is that AI will definitely impact, but I think mostly what we are trying to understand is that it will impact agencies or ecosystem which will refuse to evolve.”
Rajagopal said the technology should be seen as an opportunity to improve efficiency and reduce turnaround time for advertisers.
“It will definitely evolve from how we can become more efficient, how it becomes more optimisation, how do we have reduced turnaround time to our advertisers.”
To illustrate how quickly agentic AI can compress timelines, Rajagopal referred to a recent example by Razorpay co-founder Shashank Kumar about the company launching an agent payment platform. According to the post, onboarding a partner earlier used to take four to eight weeks. With the new AI-driven system, the process was completed in under four minutes.
“I think that’s the impact of time or that’s the impact of efficiency which we can do when you bring in more of agentic AI,” Rajagopal said.
The shift could significantly alter how agencies operate internally. Rajagopal said planners who traditionally handled both planning and execution will increasingly move toward strategic work as AI handles operational tasks.
“An agency planner’s role will change from a planning to execution specialist to a more strategic point of view.”
Das said the efficiency gains are already visible in campaign management. He pointed to programmatic campaign setups that often involve hundreds of line items, multiple geographic segments and different creatives.
In traditional workflows, traders would manually configure these campaigns across platforms, a process that can take several hours.
“You can literally do that, bulk uploads in minutes. You’re able to generate hundreds of line items, align different creatives across those line items with just a natural language prompt,” Das said.
For markets like India, where programmatic adoption is still evolving and guaranteed deals remain common, such automation could bring meaningful efficiency to fragmented buying structures.
At the same time, Das cautioned that efficiency alone cannot define the future value of agencies. Faster campaign setup could also raise questions from clients about agency fees if operational work takes less time.
He described efficiency as a “double-edged sword” for agencies.
Instead, the industry should focus more on effectiveness and business outcomes rather than only operational speed.
AI-powered insight agents built into buying platforms are also beginning to change how campaigns are monitored. Traditionally, teams would pull reports, analyse them manually and then make optimisation decisions.
Now, AI systems can analyse performance in real time and recommend corrective actions immediately.
“Today, the insight agents, once a line item goes live, you can just do a prompt to ask that, let’s say a line item is underpacing and ask the agent to give three or four reasons as to why the line item is underpacing,” Das said.
The system can then suggest possible fixes and implement them within seconds.
Such capabilities allow advertisers to monitor whether their campaigns are performing as planned and make mid-campaign changes instead of waiting for post-campaign reports.
Rajagopal said this real-time feedback loop is becoming increasingly important for marketers who want to link media metrics more closely with business outcomes.
“Do I get real-time analysis whether my strategy is delivering or not,” he said, describing a question that most advertisers now expect platforms to answer.
Both speakers agreed that agentic AI is unlikely to eliminate the need for agencies. Instead, it will change the nature of their work. Operational tasks will increasingly be handled by machines, while human teams focus on strategy, insights and business impact.