Welcome to one of premium video’s biggest inflection points of the last few decades: the operational complexity that's long slowed audience activation across TV and streaming is precisely what agentic AI is now built to resolve, and the advertisers who move first stand to reset what's possible for the category. At OpenAP's Cannes Audience Summit, moderator Chris LoRusso of OpenAP led RPA's Lisa Herdman, Omnicom Media's Ben Hovaness, Acxiom's Martin Wexler and Dentsu Creative's Jovan Dupor through a conversation about how agentic AI can finally deliver the long-promised vision of building an audience once and activating it everywhere.
"We've got to work together, or it will just go down the easy path to the easy button to the walled gardens." - Lisa Herdman
That operational complexity has a real cost, and it's been paid in TV and streaming budgets. Every hour an agency spends on manual workflow tasks or resolving fragmentation is an hour not spent making the case for premium video's actual advantages. That imbalance compounds every budget cycle.
"It's the garbage in, garbage out concept... if you're not going to have good inputs that you trust, you're then giving up control in the middle." - Martin Wexler
AI agents offer the promise of automating the workflow, but AI is only as smart as the data flowing through it. Automated workflows only work if what's flowing through it can be trusted, and that bar is higher than it's ever been. If an agent is working with subpar audience identity data, an old email or a wrong IP address, what you’ll get is confidently wrong output at scale rather than right output faster.
"If we want to move towards more of this agentic world, then actually the measurement of outcomes is going to become even more important." - Ben Hovaness
That same logic extends past audience data and into how outcomes get measured in the first place. There's no agreed-upon standard for what counts as a delivered outcome, and ceding more of the buying process to machines raises the stakes on closing that gap rather than lowering them.
"We have to break bad behaviors and patterns that we've created over the last 30 years... we can't work the way we've worked with these systems." - Jovan Dupor
The rules for governing this technology haven't caught up to how fast it's scaling, and that gap is exactly where the opportunity sits. The governance bodies and standards groups in the video advertising space have a real opportunity to set the rules for the market. Premium video's biggest players already have a seat at that table, shaping what the future of disclosure, trust and accountability look like.