The Trade Desk is talking to agency execs about Koa Agents, a set of agentic features meant to automate large parts of programmatic setup and troubleshooting. The system connects with whatever AI model a partner is using — including Anthropic’s Claude — through an interoperability layer called Open Agentic Kit.
According to an agency exec familiar with the conversations, a Claude-connected workflow can ingest a media plan, reformat it into The Trade Desk’s template, and build the campaign. From there, it can flag creative issues and recommend next steps, with the reasoning attached. Jordan Rost, The Trade Desk’s vp of product marketing, described Koa Agents as spanning “everything from identifying and building audience strategies all the way to campaign setup, deployment and troubleshooting.”
There is a speed bump, carefully placed: the agent is not buying ads, “at least not yet,” per Digiday. Koa Agents sit on top of The Trade Desk’s existing Koa AI inside Kokai, its automated campaign management platform, which launched three years ago. For now, the focus is the pre-launch slog, not autonomous bidding or post-launch optimization. The workflow is also human-approved: marketers still sign off before execution, and the system is supposed to explain what it is recommending rather than simply doing things in the background like a very expensive intern with root access.
CEO Jeff Green gave a small availability hint at Marketecture Live in March. Asked whether someone could use Claude to create a campaign inside the platform, he said: “If you’re a part of our closed beta, yes.” Then came the self-edit: “I wasn’t supposed to say that.”
Green’s broader argument is that programmatic’s many adjustable variables make it unusually suited to agents that can frame trade-offs quickly. His example: scaling a $500,000 campaign to $1 million could involve “10,000 different things.”
The business-model yoga is happening underneath. Rost emphasized data portability — letting advertisers take campaign performance data out of The Trade Desk to train their own models — which in an “agentic world” is either differentiation or basic hygiene, depending on how jaded you are.
Shiv Gupta, founder of U of Digital, pointed to the contradiction: simplifying programmatic buying runs against The Trade Desk’s “every knob and lever” DNA, and against the agency services economy built around operating those knobs. Digiday notes that The Trade Desk signed 45 joint business deals in March alone, a 55% year-over-year jump, pulling more advertisers into direct platform relationships. Automation lowers the barrier. It also quietly asks what happens to the specialist layer the platform used to require.
As TAU founder Robert Webster put it, the play may be less about helping holdcos, which can build their own AI operating systems, and more about giving brands and independents access to “MCP plus Claude” as a planning layer “across Google, Meta, TikTok and the rest without the build cost.”
Read more at Digiday.