The Agent's Station
In March 2024, about a year into the ChatGPT-propelled generative AI boom, fantasy and sci-fi author Joanna Maciejewska posted a highly
influential tweet lamenting the “wrong direction” in which the world was pushing AI and delineating the types of work she did and didn’t want AI doing for her: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
In the last 2-plus years, Maciejewska’s sentiments have been repeated and appropriated innumerable times (usually without attribution), as this wrong-direction AI push into our professional and creative lives has continued unabated.
We yield to its good-enough bona fides because its standards-steamrolling power arrives with such force of inevitability via speed and efficiency alone that we’ll soon find it increasingly hard to remember that we ever did these things for ourselves. The idea of keeping some tasks in the human camp will soon just seem anachronistic.
I’m reminded of an unincorporated town in Lake County, Ill., called Half Day, that Google Maps tells us sits 38 minutes outside of Chicago. But the widely accepted story that the town got its name because it stood “half a day’s ride” from Chicago at the time of its founding seems perfectly plausible, even if allotting half a day to get there (even with traffic) would seem ridiculous now.
The only areas where generative AI seems inclined to cede any ground is to the excitement surrounding its near-mate, agentic AI, which gobbled up most of the buzz at a Data + AI conference where I shot some video in early May, as well as at our latest Streaming Media Connect virtual event later in the month. At the Data Summit conference, I learned that the latest developments in AI-enabling tech are not even being designed for human users; they’re being designed for the agents through whom humans interact with these solutions. So, whether it’s dishes or laundry or art or writing, we’re not even off-loading tasks to gen AI anymore; we’re just telling agents what we want them to off-load.
One way agentic AI is making inroads into streaming monetization, as I learned at Streaming Media Connect, offers the potential to complement and free up time for human creativity rather than replace it. At that event, Shailley Singh, IAB Tech Lab COO and EVP of product, described one area where he believes agentic AI is “being applied” and increasingly poised to “take over” in CTV and OTT advertising operations. He recalled that in his first job in the advertising space, he found “creative management … a very laborious process. I think there were an average of 20-plus emails exchanged to finalize one [piece of] creative that was ready to be used.” By relegating this process to agent-to-agent communication, he says, “AI is something that can actually solve that.”
Singh sees agentic AI having a similar impact in managing deals. In both cases, “Ultimately, the aspirational vision and the goal are that there will be autonomous agents that would send the media brief. On the other side, the seller agent would analyze that and provide the media plan or the media kits or the options that they have available. And then an agent would select and be able to decide on what media to buy, where to buy, and how to buy and at what price. And all of that requires agents talking to each other, for which there are standard protocols like MCP [model context protocol].”
It might not have the obvious appeal of a sci-fi writer enlisting an AI agent to do her laundry and wash her dishes so she can focus her energies on writing the dystopian fiction her fans know and love, but it sounds a lot less dystopian than a world in which AI is generating the dystopian worlds—or one in which we can’t even tell the difference.
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How are publishers and advertisers leveraging AI in CTV ad ops in 2026? According to IAB Tech Lab COO and EVP of product Shailley Singh, managing creative and data coming out of campaigns are two key areas; others include prevalidating creative and generating contextual data, says Sargeway, LLC owner Sarge Sargent. Both explain how these processes work and the value AI adds in this discussion with Streaming Media contributing editor Nadine Krefetz from Streaming Media Connect 2026.
29 May 2026