Integral Ad Science is making a clear statement about where ad verification and optimization are headed. The company has announced IAS Agent, a new AI-powered assistant designed to help marketers activate campaigns faster, uncover deeper insights, and optimize performance at scale—without surrendering control to a black box.

Set to debut publicly at CES 2026, IAS Agent will roll out globally in early Q1 2026 at no additional cost to customers. That pricing decision alone signals how seriously IAS views AI assistance as a baseline expectation rather than a premium upsell.

An AI assistant built for marketers, not data scientists

IAS Agent is positioned as a natural-language interface layered directly into the IAS platform, allowing marketers to interact with campaign intelligence conversationally. Users can chat with the agent to streamline pre-campaign setup, adjust brand safety and suitability settings, and surface insights without needing technical expertise or manual dashboard analysis.

What differentiates IAS Agent from many AI tools flooding the ad tech market is its foundation: more than 15 years of proprietary IAS data across viewability, fraud, brand safety, and suitability, applied at omnichannel scale. Rather than relying on narrow or synthetic training sets, the assistant draws from what IAS describes as the industry’s most comprehensive dataset.

That matters in a market where AI recommendations often feel disconnected from real-world media complexity. IAS Agent’s outputs are grounded in historical patterns across publishers, platforms, and formats—not just recent signals.

Explainable AI, not opaque automation

The most pointed critique of AI in advertising has been its opacity. IAS is leaning directly into that concern with what it calls “explainable AI.”

Every recommendation surfaced by IAS Agent includes transparent self-reporting. Marketers can hover over suggestions inside the IAS UI to see what’s being recommended, why it’s being proposed, and what data signals informed the guidance. Users retain full control: they can customize, override, or adopt recommendations based on their own judgment and client requirements.

This design choice reflects a broader industry shift. As AI systems increasingly influence media spend, advertisers need to justify decisions internally—to legal teams, brand leaders, and regulators. Tools that can’t explain themselves are becoming liabilities rather than advantages.

Faster insights, fewer manual workflows

Beyond transparency, IAS Agent is built to reduce one of the most persistent drains on media teams: time.

According to IAS, early tests show efficiency gains of up to 50 percent in areas like brand safety and suitability configuration. The agent can recommend protection settings with minimal user input, allowing teams to scale governance across all investments without rebuilding rules for every campaign.

IAS Agent also continuously scans data across IAS dashboards to detect trends and patterns automatically. Instead of analysts hunting for signals across multiple reports, the agent surfaces what’s working—and what isn’t—up to five times faster than manual analysis.

In an environment where campaigns are increasingly fluid and omnichannel by default, that speed advantage could be decisive.

From campaign setup to real-time optimization

IAS Agent’s utility spans the full campaign lifecycle. During activation, marketers can use natural language prompts to get AI-assisted guidance on settings and configurations. Once campaigns are live, the agent highlights performance drivers, surfaces risk signals, and suggests optimizations in real time.

Crucially, IAS frames the tool not as a replacement for human decision-making, but as an advertising compass—guiding teams through complexity rather than automating judgment away.

Srishti Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Integral Ad Science, emphasized that IAS Agent is only the beginning. Future iterations are expected to expand agentic capabilities across supply path insights, tagging activation, and campaign settings assistance, further reducing friction across the media workflow.

Why agencies are paying attention

For agencies managing large, distributed media buys, the appeal is immediate. Jeff Omoregie, EVP of Unified TAAG at Publicis Media, highlighted the tool’s potential to reduce ad waste and speed action across complex environments.

That endorsement underscores a critical point: verification and optimization are no longer separate steps. They’re converging into a single intelligence layer that informs planning, activation, and optimization simultaneously.

IAS Agent positions IAS closer to that role—less a post-bid watchdog, more an always-on decision engine.

Responsible AI as a competitive differentiator

IAS is also using the launch to reinforce its stance on responsible AI. The agent is built using Databricks Agent Bricks, enabling enterprise-grade governance and observability—two requirements that are quickly becoming non-negotiable for large advertisers.

IAS notes it is the only company to hold all three major AI certifications relevant to the industry: TrustArc Responsible AI, ISO 42001, and Ethical AI certification from the Alliance for Audited Media. In a landscape where AI claims often outpace accountability, those credentials are meant to signal credibility.

A glimpse at the future of ad verification platforms

IAS Agent reflects a broader transformation underway in MarTech and AdTech. Verification platforms are evolving from compliance tools into intelligence systems—ones that don’t just flag problems, but actively guide better outcomes.

As AI assistants become embedded across marketing stacks, the winners will be those that combine scale, transparency, and trust. IAS is betting that explainability—not just automation—will be the feature that determines adoption.

For marketers facing tighter budgets, higher scrutiny, and increasing complexity, an AI assistant that can explain itself may be exactly what the industry has been waiting for.

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