By Gary Mittman, CEO, KERV.ai
At the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2026, one thing was clear: the industry is no longer debating whether AI will transform advertising. The real question is whether we can build the standards, infrastructure, and trust required to ensure this shift benefits consumers, brands, and publishers – not just the systems optimizing the ecosystem.
This year’s meeting felt less like a conference and more like a checkpoint in the middle of a major transition. Executives spoke with unusual candor. There was optimism, but also fatigue. Excitement, but also unease. Underneath nearly every conversation was the same tension: the future is arriving faster than the industry is prepared to govern it.
AI Is the Dominant Force – But We Still Don’t Have a Shared Playbook
AI wasn’t simply a theme at ALM – it was the atmosphere. Speakers framed it as the next platform shift, on par with programmatic, mobile, and social. There was broad agreement that AI will reshape advertising, commerce, discovery, and consumer behavior in the next two years.
But what stood out wasn’t the consensus that AI is transformational. It was the lack of alignment on what comes next.
The industry is moving rapidly toward agentic experiences – agentic discovery, agentic shopping, and autonomous decision-making systems acting on behalf of consumers. Yet publishers, platforms, and brands still lack a unified framework for how these systems should work, be monetized, and have accountability enforced when decisions are made by AI rather than people.
The takeaway was urgency without clarity.
Trust Has Become a First-Class Business Metric
Trust emerged as both a moral and commercial priority. Many leaders acknowledged what consumers have been signaling for years: the 2010s eroded trust through clickbait, invasive ad experiences, opaque targeting, and data practices that prioritized short-term performance over long-term credibility.
In response, the industry is gravitating toward environments perceived as more human and authentic, such as creators, influencers, podcasts, and smaller, intentional placements. These formats consistently score highly on trust, attention, and brand affinity.
But they also highlight the industry’s structural tension: what consumers trust most is often what scales least efficiently.
Audio’s Moment Is Real – But Its Business Constraints Remain
Audio received outsized attention this year, driven in part by sponsorship and the industry’s desire to diversify beyond visual media. Audio continues to test exceptionally well on emotional resonance and trust, but many sessions acknowledged the same core friction points:
- Brand lift and awareness measurement remain slow
- Attribution is still weak and indirect
- ROI is difficult to prove at scale
- Audio remains a small portion of most media plans
Audio is powerful, but not operationally efficient. That same tension appeared in discussions about creators and influencers: high impact, high trust, but difficult to measure and hard to scale.
Complexity Is Driving Burnout Across the Ecosystem
One of the most striking themes at ALM was the candor around exhaustion. Digital advertising has become more complex, less transparent, and increasingly intermediated. The “ad tech tax” surfaced repeatedly as leaders acknowledged the value lost between buyers and publishers.
Last year, the ANA’s 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark showed that only around 41% of programmatic ad spend reaches quality publisher inventory, with the remainder absorbed by intermediaries and inefficiencies – leaving billions in unrealized media value across the ecosystem.
AI is being positioned as both the solution and the risk. Agentic automation could simplify workflows, but many worry it will introduce new layers of opacity rather than removing old ones.
This fatigue mirrors what we’ve experienced at KERV, reinforcing that these challenges are systemic, not company-specific.
Privacy, Regulation, and Commerce Are Now Colliding
Regulators had a notable presence this year, including the Attorney General of Nebraska, and the message was clear: consumer protection is accelerating, and AI is raising the stakes.
As AI-driven systems grow more powerful (and more opaque), regulatory pressure will increase. Privacy, trust, and compliance are no longer separate initiatives -they are converging into a single strategic concern for every company operating in advertising and commerce.
Creative and Context Are Becoming the Foundation Again
While rarely framed as the headline topic, creative quality and contextual relevance surfaced repeatedly as a critical undercurrent. As identity signals weaken and targeting becomes more constrained, the industry is rediscovering a core truth: advertising works best when it matches the moment.
Context is no longer a fallback strategy. It is becoming the infrastructure of relevance and performance in a privacy-constrained world – an evolution that aligns directly with what we believe at KERV.
Search and Discovery Are Being Rewritten
Google’s framing was telling: AI is not replacing search, but becoming an assistive layer above it. AI summaries increasingly sit at the top of results, shaping what consumers see first.
Consumers still seek evidence and information, but the pathways to discovery are changing quickly. Gartner projects that traditional search engine usage will decline 25% by 2026 and that by 2028, organic search traffic to websites will fall 50% or more, as consumers increasingly shift search and discovery to generative AI assistants – meaning roughly half of all search activity could occur outside of classic search engines within the next few years. For advertisers and publishers, this needs to be a wake-up call: discovery is shifting from links to conversations, mediated by agents and LLMs models that decide what – and who – matter most.
The Look Ahead: The Winners Will Simplify and Earn Trust
The IAB and the IAB Tech Lab are clearly positioning themselves as a unifying layer across AI, privacy, and measurement. But the volume of frameworks and initiatives also reflects the ecosystem’s early stage and fragmentation.
The next era of advertising will not be won by whoever adopts AI first. It will be won by those who apply AI responsibly, transparently, and in service of outcomes consumers actually want.
The industry doesn’t need more automation for its own sake. It needs simplification, fewer intermediaries, and systems that can prove value – not just optimize spend.
The agentic era is here. The question is, will we shape it with intention, or will we let it shape us?
