David Jones, Founder & CEO of Brandtech, spoke here with me more than six years ago in a predictive mode that forecast all of today’s talk about AI and agentic advertising. He described how Artificial Intelligence (AI) would be irretrievably reshaping the future of marketing and advertising.
At that time, well before most others were conversant with or even thinking much about the disruptive transformations that would accompany the AI era, he described the future state of a changed digital marketing and advertising landscape, “If I had to label the next phase, it would be ‘the intelligence economy.’ By that I mean, all the amazing things that AI is going to enable–I don’t think we yet comprehend just how massive its impact will be on everything from content creation and distribution to customer service to entire business models.”
The insight was: With his Brandtech group, he was integrating a series of services and products designed to help clients succeed in the new era. He was creating a way that brand marketers could get deeper into technology so that their messaging was “better, faster, cheaper”–adapted to the new demands of a digital era.
As Jones was building out the capabilities he would deliver, he said, “It’s no longer about advertising. It’s about technology and about ‘people power,’ finding the ways to have your customers work with the brands to tell their stories, doing marketing in this new digital world in a new, and appropriate way.’”
Prescient.
Given that brands are now clamoring for just those very kinds of services and products and as the rest industry, across publishers and platforms and agencies and brands, has begun to catch up to Jones’s forecasts, we sat down to look again at the present and near-future landscape to analyze the state of AI and advertising right now and in 2026.
Our far-ranging conversation touched on his 5 AI Predictions for 2026, the near term and a bit further out, as well as his insights on the state of the investment markets and all the mergers and changes in the wider agency world. Jones is certainly a thought leader worth listening to.
David Doty: It certainly is an interesting time as AI rocks the world, and especially digital advertising and marketing, just as you keenly predicted more than six years ago. When you look at the landscape now, what are you seeing?
David Jones: Yes, good to speak again. I have five key AI predictions for 2026, which I can summarize as:
- Gen AI at scale
- High-craft Gen AI
- This will be the year of AI agents, with an increasing need to understand « share of model » for brand perception
- A creator economy on steroids, with the potential for AI to disintermediate social platforms and usher in an « agentic economy”
Doty: Tell us more. Take those one by one.
Jones: Gen AI at scale involves moving past « pilot purgatory » and deploying generative AI at mass scale and speed. One example that I can give from my company’s experience is Pencil, our Gen AI creation platform for marketers. Since its launch in 2018, Pencil has created 5 million ads. And, recently, in Q1 2025, three of the world’s top 10 largest advertisers, used the platform to generate 235,000 pieces of in-market content, which, by our measurements, was 62% faster, 55% cheaper, and yielded 40% better ROI.
The second prediction is « high-craft Gen AI, » which is moving at a speed we couldn’t have foreseen just a year ago. You now have the ability to create any TV commercial with Gen AI, which was not possible a short time ago.
Brandtech Group
Doty: Does that tie into the AI agents prediction?
Jones: As 2026 unfolds, it will be the year of AI agents. These agents can be « daisychained » to perform complex tasks instantaneously and at an unlimited scale. Think tasks such as analyzing trends, creating campaign ideas, generating key visuals, and even producing entire videos.
Doty: Can you cite concrete examples for readers of agents that connect brands to consumers?
Jones: Amazon’s Rufus–an agent that serves as a shopping assistant–is a great example. Amazon reports that it expects Rufus to lead to $10 billion in incremental annual sales and a 60% higher probability of customers completing a purchase.
The fourth prediction focuses on our own Share of Model tool from Jellyfish, Brandtech’s global digital marketing company. It tracks how different Large Language Models (LLMs) perceive any one brand differently, and how marketers can influence that perception. Learning how to navigate this new landscape is critical since billions of people, particularly younger demographics, are now using LLMs and AI agents for information.
Doty: How does all this look for the creator economy?
Jones: Brands should be prepared for the « creator economy on AI steroids.” The ad industry itself has been slow to adopt Gen AI creativity compared to creators, who have taken to it much more quickly. Gen AI essentially turns everyone– or at least every creator–into an ad agency. It enables the building of high-quality content, like a TV commercial as I said, much faster and cheaper. Creators, without the « baggage” attached to agencies, are leading with impressive work.
Doty: Our time is already nearly up. But I would like to ask you first about agency consolidation, and if AI is driving that, and what you think about all this “AI financial bubble” talk.
Jones: The consolidation in the agency world has nothing to do with AI. It is actually largely a delayed reaction to the first digital revolution (the move to mobile), where traditional agencies lost relevance. Clients now require state-of-the-art AI marketing capabilities, and making legacy companies bigger is not the strategy they need. The current consolidation might give some companies a temporary story for two or three years to appease financial markets, but it doesn’t address what clients are looking for.
The future of the agency industry–as the role of AI agents grows–will see 60% to 70% of the marketing and advertising world eventually operating without humans in the loop. AI and agents will manage content creation, distribution, and optimization at a scale too fast for human involvement. The remaining 30% to 40% will be « super high craft » work done by brilliant humans leveraging AI tools. This will create a polarization in the industry.
AI will also surely revolutionize media planning and buying. While the content creation revolution via AI is immediate, media will drive the biggest changes in the medium to long term.
As for the financial markets, there will be « microbubbles » with overvalued companies, but there is not a foreseeable macro-level bubble because AI is a horizontal, not vertical, revolution, impacting every human activity.
Doty: Any final words?
Jones: Yes, AI is « magical » and, I agree with Eric Schmidt: AI is currently underhyped. That’s my prediction.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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