Plenty about CNN’s future is up in the air now the Skydance deal has gone through. CNN International’s plan to sell ads through AI agents isn’t among them. Seven months after announcing the move, the network still has it on course to launch in the first quarter of 2027.
“I gave a Q1 timeline to have the first dollars flowing, which I would still be hopeful for,” said Faisal Karmali, who is the vp of digital operations for CNN International Commercial and sister company Warner Bros Discovery.
Beyond the timeline, the network has shared little about the agent itself. What’s on record is that it’s building in-house agentic infrastructure alongside third-party tech and vendors such as demand-side platforms. The plan then was to finish scoping the protocols by the end of the second quarter, test how one or two properties are read by LLMs in the third and look at buyer behaviour and budget allocation in the fourth. Early use cases would centre on performance campaigns before widening out. So far that plan appears to be on schedule.
Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.