Author: Jessica Davies

CNN is developing an agentic infrastructure as part of a broader roadmap that will see it begin transacting media by the first quarter of 2027. 

The news media company, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, expects to have finished scoping agentic protocols by the end of Q2, according to Faisal Karmali, CNN International Commercial’s vp of digital business operations. In Q3, it plans to test one or two properties to see how they’re interpreted by LLMs, before turning in Q4 to buyer behavior and whether budgets are being allocated toward agent-to-agent trading experiments.

“In terms of having it as a full trading model and a new revenue generator, I would say Q1,” Karmali told Digiday. “In Q4 we’d like to be ready for people who want to test budgets, so that when we want to begin to trade against it fully, it’s already tried and tested,” he added. 

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Agency trading desks spent a decade trying to live down what they were. Horizon Media thinks it’s finally figured out what they should become. 

It’s building what it describes internally as an “orchestration and intelligence” layer that sits above ad tech rather than alongside it. The idea: plug every relevant media marketplace partner – demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, ad verification vendors, data partners, measurement providers and creative tech – into a central command center of sorts. That command centre, dubbed “Horizon OS” – shorthand for Open Sphere – has already sent RFIs to more than 200 potential partners, which have been whittled down to a pilot cohort now in a green-lit integration phase. 

“The whole idea is we are canvassing the entirety of the media marketplace and basically saying, ‘hey, media marketplace partners, you are being invited in to integrate with Horizon’s central brain’, which will become the elevated orchestration and intelligence layer,” said Maikel O’Hanlon, svp and managing director, programmatic at Horizon. 

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