Dentsu’s Carat is working with NBCUniversal, Freewheel and AI firm Newton on an agent that plans, buys and optimizes upfront investments. None of the four would name the luxury retail client said to be using it already. Independent agency Tinuiti opened its proprietary measurement layer to AI agents through a Bliss Point Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that puts audience, creative, media and measurement in one place. Stagwell relaunched Assembly, its media agency, as Stagwell Media, built around Machine OS, an agentic system meant to help the agency respond faster when markets shift. All three were highlighted during the week of Advertising Week New York in October 2026.
Clients uneasy about agents going rogue are mostly being answered with people. Rebekah Shalit, Dentsu’s head of platforms, placed every task “on a sliding scale of low to high human oversight,” with repeatable work like billing and campaign reporting at the low end and strategic and long-term innovation planning, which “really require human craft,” at the high end. Freewheel chief product officer David Dworin gave the reason for keeping a human in the loop: the agents are new, “and we don’t trust them, and they make mistakes.”
At WPP Media, Lauren Wetzel, global president of data and tech solutions, said agents can analyze and evaluate inventory across media owners, but where a decision carries a financial or activation impact, the holdco requires “explicit controls, approval thresholds, accountable human oversight.” It also separates probabilistic AI recommendations from deterministic execution. Stagwell’s Slavi Samardzija, global chair of media and commerce, said reassurance comes from explaining who orchestrates the work: teams reshaped to carry more senior people directing the agents, each expert across several parts of the media and commerce workflow.
Carat chief investment officer Carrie Drinkwater was slightly more bullish. She called agentic buying an opportunity built on compound learning, telling clients that within a year the agency will know far more about their business. “If we don’t start now, we’ll be behind,” she said.
Read more at Digiday.