5 Artificial Intelligence Marketing Predictions for 2025
Published: January 6, 2026
Expect AI agents to level up in advertising in 2026, giving media buyers a full complement of tools to execute campaigns across the internet and new platforms, including voice-enabled devices, experts told Ad Age. Even brands with the smallest budgets will have advertising capabilities they never had before.
2025 saw the first, rudimentary steps of agentic AI in media planning and buying, but the automating effects are only going to grow in 2026, the experts predicted. Indeed, agentic AI will likely spread to new formats, including digital out-of-home advertising and beyond. Meanwhile, to facilitate this automation, expect brands to strike more deals with major AI platforms, a trend that started in recent years. Major consumer brands have been eager to team up with the likes of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Microsoft.
Of course, predicting what will happen at the intersection of AI and marketing is not a science. But marketing experts still looked into their crystal balls and shared with Ad Age their top AI marketing predictions for 2026.
Media planning goes full-on agentic
Agentic AI will take over media planning, experts said. Agents will be able to turn descriptive prompts into campaign strategies, then hand off those instructions to agents representing both buyers and sellers, who will work together to trade money and inventory. The programmatic ecosystem is already starting to see this level of automation, but agents will go even further next year, said Frans Vermeulen, president of ad tech platform Swivel.
“Instead of just automating what exists today, these agents open the door to new types of deals, new product formats that don’t fit into legacy pipes, and scale that humans simply cannot match,” Vermeulen said.
By the end of next year, AI will account for the planning of at least a quarter of digital-out-of-home (DOOH) and video campaigns globally, said Jonathan Gudai, CEO of DOOH platform AdOmni. This revolution could ultimately benefit small brands the most, Gudai said. Agents can take plain language descriptions of campaigns and turn them into robust media plans. Those with fewer resources will discover a newfound ability to do what larger marketers have always been able to do.
“For decades, sophisticated media planning was the domain of the few, meaning large brands with big budgets and specialist teams,” Gudai said. “AI has leveled that playing field.”
More brands will strike direct partnerships with AI companies
This year, brands from L’Oréal to Yum partnered directly with AI powerhouses like Nvidia and OpenAI. Expect to see more of these deals in 2026.
The motive will be mostly around increasing visibility in AI search platforms, said Dan Gardner, co-founder and executive chairman of Code and Theory.
“Brands will need strong partnerships because more of the customer journey is happening inside large AI-driven platforms that control how people discover and buy,” Gardner said.
Several of these AI players already offer some version of brand collaboration, such as Perplexity’s merchant partner program. But as marketers and publishers rely more heavily on reaching consumers in AI search, more opportunities to cozy up to AI companies could emerge.
At the same time, brands will need to team up with other brands in order to protect their website experiences from being completely gobbled up by AI search. These will effectively be “brand-to-brand digital alliances,” Gardner said. A collab between L’Oréal and Yum? Coca-Cola and McDonald’s? Anything could happen in this shifting landscape.
“These partnerships will create smoother customer experiences and help companies keep some connection to their customers at a time when the big platforms will control more of that access,” Gardner said.
Voice AI will be marketers’ new shiny toy
Marketers will find a shiny new toy to play with in 2026: voice-enabled AI. This technology has already started to change how consumers use their devices, especially thanks to the rise of highly advanced voice capabilities in platforms such as ChatGPT.
Today, among consumers who use AI for routine tasks, 32% use Alexa and 25% use Siri, even though both still experience plenty of shortcomings, according to a report from Menlo Ventures. As the technology continues to improve and usage climbs, contextual advertising will find a way in, said Crystal Foote, founder and head of partnerships for ad tech company Digital Culture Group.
“Voice offers the immediacy and intimacy of conversation, paired with the potential for contextual targeting that reflects a consumer’s exact need in that moment,” Foote said.
For instance, Foote sees a place for ads to arise when a consumer asks Alexa for a recipe, instructs Google Home to play a podcast, or checks the weather with Siri.
These growing consumer behaviors “[signal] a major opportunity for brands to rethink how, where, and when they show up in consumers’ lives,” Foote said.
AI search will force a new compensation model for publishers
The rise of AI search will force the publishing industry to widely adopt a new compensation model in 2026.
This will be initiated through regulatory progress made over the course of the year, said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab. In Europe, this process has already begun. A German court ruled in November that OpenAI violated copyright law by using German songs to train ChatGPT, and ordered the company to pay damages to music rights society GEMA, which filed the case, according to Reuters.
These types of rulings in the U.S. will pave the way for a more robust compensation model for publishers, Katsur said. AI companies will want to avoid the lawsuits—which they are facing from the likes of New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and News Corp.—and court-ordered payments. And publishers will jump at the chance to strike a long-term economic framework that finally pays them for their content.
“Without a rebalanced system in which value flows back to content creators, the open web risks deep structural decline at the very moment its importance to AI models is increasing,” Katsur said.
Marketers will place new emphasis on the data underlying AI
The data that powers AI will become a new focus for marketers, experts said. For several years, AI tech has absorbed most of the industry’s attention. But without a steady stream of quality data, these systems cannot function. Marketers will start to care a lot more about what’s under the hood in 2026.
For instance, marketers may start feeding real consumer data into their AI systems, as opposed to synthetic—or artificially generated—data that is easier to produce but less realistic, said Misha Williams, chief operating officer of analytics firm GWI.
“Winning brands will pair AI with real, structured, psychographic data, turning automation into cultural relevance,” Williams said.
On the flip side, losing brands will be those who have low-quality data powering their AI tools, according to Matt Spiegel, executive VP of TruAudience growth strategy at information firm TransUnion.
“The quality, measured in accuracy, depth, and scale, of the data behind these tools will determine whether predictions are accurate or misleading,” Spiegel said.
Publishers, such as those in the connected TV, news and entertainment industries, could emerge as a key provider of this insightful consumer data. This value proposition could help keep them afloat as AI-powered search cuts into their traditional business models.
“The most forward-thinking publishers are transforming into data engines, leveraging onsite behaviors, first-party signals, and contextual engagement to build scalable, compliant, high-performance [data-as-a-service] offerings,” said Jaime Schultheis, head of global data partnerships for digital advertising company Bombora.
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