AI's role in advertising infrastructure dominated multiple conversations this week, from the agentic buying debate to Smartly's Laura Desmond calling for an entirely new creative system to handle the volume explosion that AI-generated content is producing. Desmond's argument — that the industry's creative workflows were built for a world of scarcity, not the abundance that generative AI now enables — is one of the more practically grounded takes on AI's impact that emerged this week. The implication for platforms is significant: if creative production is no longer the bottleneck, then distribution intelligence, brand safety, and contextual relevance become the new competitive differentiators.
Google's UCP update, which integrates carts, catalogs, and loyalty data into AI-powered shopping experiences, also drew attention as a concrete example of how AI infrastructure is being embedded directly into the commerce layer — blurring the line between advertising platform and shopping platform in ways that have significant implications for how retail media and search advertising interact going forward.