Interoperability may be the future, but it cannot be an entire AI strategy

Patricia Clark, vp, go-to-market, Nexxen

AI has become more than the topic du jour. It’s the topic of the year — and probably the decade — in and outside the world of advertising. For agencies, AI presents particularly compelling opportunities: less manual work, faster insights and a greater ability to connect planning, activation, optimization and measurement. And as agentic AI develops, a natural language request could become a coordinated, multi-step workflow spanning different data, media and technology platforms.

It’s one of many reasons interoperability matters, as agencies shouldn’t have to choose between flexibility and innovation, nor should they be locked into a single provider’s architecture. Open standards, like model context protocol and Agent2Agent, point toward a more unified ecosystem, where an agency’s own tools and AI agents can work securely with other external DSPs. And in advertising, where campaigns already span multiple systems, data sources and supply paths, the ability to connect those systems is fast becoming an operational mandate.

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OpenAI would like to remind marketers that its ads are for the good of humanity 

In case anyone at Advertising Week New York had lost track of why ChatGPt carries ads, OpenAI’s Samantha Jacobson offered a reminder that the company pursued it “so that all of humanity could benefit from AGI”. 

Jacobson, OpenAI’s vp of monetization partnerships, made the claim during a panel question about privacy and consumer trust, and her version of the ad-funded bargain sounds a lot like the ones that came before it. Ads cover the people who won’t pay for ChatGPT, since “not everyone’s going to be able to,” she said. She then drew comparisons to Paramount’s subscription tiers, priced by how many ads a viewer will sit through, with owner Skydance’s ad tech boss Derek Michael a few seats away on the same stage.

But a pre-roll costs a Paramount viewer a few minutes. Free ChatGPT asks for something more personal since its ads are matched to what someone is asking and, unless they switch personalisation off, to signals from their wider use of the product. People raised on the ad-funded internet learned the hard way that when they don’t pay for a product they become the product, and that lesson leaves OpenAI with a delicate bargain to sell. Jacobson, naturally, was keen to stress that “consumer trust is the single most important thing,” and that the company would protect it “even if it’s at the expense or revenue or other partnership opportunities”.

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