Since founding adserve in 2018, we've operated under the adserve.com name, both as a business and across the products we bring to market. That was a deliberate choice. Our company, our technology and the way we worked with customers were closely connected, and it made sense to represent them under one identity.
Eight years later, something quite fundamental is changing. And it's happening faster than I think any of us could have imagined.
That something, of course, is artificial intelligence.
We've been on this journey for a while
AI isn't something we've suddenly discovered, or a trend we've decided we ought to follow.
We were among the early adopters of AI-assisted software engineering in our sector, incorporating Claude into our development processes and writing our first Claude Code as part of adserve studio back in July 2024.
What started as a way to help our engineering teams work more effectively has steadily evolved into something much bigger. AI is increasingly becoming part of the functionality we deliver directly to customers, changing how they interact with our software and, more importantly, what that software can achieve for their businesses.
And the more we explore these possibilities, the more convinced we become of their potential.
Interestingly, we registered the adserve.ai domain back in 2019. We had a strong sense even then that AI would eventually become important to our industry. What we didn't anticipate was quite how quickly, or how comprehensively, that transformation would arrive.
The opportunity is enormous
When I look across the capabilities we've developed over the years, from campaign planning and order management through to scheduling, inventory management, creative operations and revenue optimisation, I struggle to identify a single area that couldn't be significantly improved through the thoughtful application of AI.
And I don't mean adding a chatbot to an existing screen and calling it innovation.
I'm talking about genuinely rethinking how advertising operations work.
Imagine an advertising business where:
Campaign planning becomes a conversation. A salesperson describes a customer's objectives, budget and target audience, and an AI planning agent develops a commercially optimised proposal, drawing on live inventory, audience data, historical performance and pricing.
Order management becomes increasingly autonomous. Agents interpret customer briefs, create orders, validate commercial terms, identify potential issues and manage amendments, involving people where their judgement is needed.
Inventory management becomes predictive. AI continuously evaluates availability, demand patterns and future bookings, identifying opportunities to release capacity, improve utilisation and reduce unsold inventory.
Pricing and yield management become far more intelligent. Rather than relying entirely on fixed rate cards and manually applied rules, AI helps identify the right price for the right inventory, balancing revenue, demand, customer value and delivery commitments.
Traffic and scheduling become proactive. AI agents identify potential clashes, delivery risks, missing creative and scheduling inefficiencies, resolving routine problems before they become operational headaches.
Creative production becomes dramatically faster. From generating scripts and audio advertisements to producing multiple creative variations, translating campaigns and adapting messages for different audiences, AI reduces the time and cost involved in getting campaigns to air.
Campaign optimisation becomes continuous. AI monitors delivery and performance, recommends adjustments, reallocates inventory where appropriate and helps ensure campaigns meet their objectives without requiring constant manual intervention.
Revenue forecasting becomes more accurate and actionable. AI analyses booking pipelines, historical trends, market conditions and available inventory to identify revenue risks and opportunities while there's still time to act.
Customer self-service becomes genuinely useful. Advertisers and agencies can brief campaigns, explore options, request changes, review performance and receive meaningful recommendations through natural conversations with intelligent agents.
Financial and commercial operations become more connected. AI identifies billing discrepancies, monitors contract compliance, reconciles delivery against bookings and helps reduce the revenue leakage that can quietly accumulate across complex advertising businesses.
These are examples, and by no means an exhaustive list.
Some are already becoming reality. Others will take longer, particularly where commercial judgement, operational complexity and the need for reliability demand a more measured approach.
But the direction is clear.
For years, software has helped people perform advertising tasks more efficiently. Increasingly, software will be capable of performing many of those tasks itself, under the direction and control of the people responsible for the business.
That's a profound shift.
The advertising market itself is changing
AI is also changing where and how advertising is bought, sold and experienced.
Generative AI platforms are becoming important new environments for consumer discovery, product recommendations and commercial engagement. As advertising develops within these environments, the boundaries between search, content, commerce and advertising will continue to evolve.
For those of us working in advertising technology, that creates opportunities well beyond automating existing processes.
It raises questions about how advertising inventory will be represented, how campaigns will be planned and purchased, how audiences will be understood, and how commercial transactions might increasingly take place between intelligent software agents.
Imagine a world where an advertiser's AI agent can negotiate with a media owner's AI agent, evaluate inventory, agree commercial terms, book a campaign and monitor its performance, all within clearly defined business rules.
That might sound ambitious today. I suspect it will sound rather ordinary before too long.
Experience matters more than ever
One of the things that gives me particular confidence in adserve's future is the combination of two capabilities that don't often come together.
First, we have more than 20 years of deep, practical experience in advertising technology and operations. We understand the complexities of planning, selling, scheduling, delivering and accounting for advertising because we've spent years solving those problems alongside our customers.
Second, we've embraced the extraordinary advances taking place in software engineering and AI.
That combination is powerful.
AI is changing the economics of software development. Capabilities that once required substantial engineering effort can increasingly be developed, tested and delivered in a fraction of the time.
For a specialist technology business like ours, that means we can respond more quickly to customer requirements, explore ideas that previously might not have been commercially viable, and extend the capabilities of our platform at a significantly lower cost.
But technology alone isn't enough. Understanding which problems are worth solving, how the advertising business actually operates, and what constitutes a commercially valuable outcome remains critically important.
That's where our experience makes the difference.
Ultimately, it's about business results
We're excited about AI, naturally. We're a technology company, and it's difficult not to be fascinated by what's happening.
But our customers don't invest in adserve because they're interested in the technology we use. They invest because they want to run better businesses.
They want to increase revenue, improve margins, reduce operating costs, make better use of their inventory and respond more quickly to their own customers.
And increasingly, we're seeing tangible evidence of those outcomes.
We're seeing how better inventory utilisation can unlock revenue that might otherwise be lost. How more intelligent pricing and yield management can improve commercial returns. How automating routine operational tasks can release valuable people to focus on customers, relationships and opportunities that genuinely require their expertise.
That's what matters to us.
The real measure of our success won't be how much AI we incorporate into our software. It will be how much additional value our customers can generate as a result.
So, why adserve.ai?
Against that background, we've decided it's time for our product identity to reflect the direction in which we're heading.
adserve.com will remain our commercial identity, while adserve.ai will increasingly represent our products, technology and innovation.
This isn't a change of ownership, a new company or an abandonment of the platforms our customers rely on today.
It's an evolution of what those platforms can become.
We're not planning to build our own frontier AI models. There are extraordinary companies investing billions in that work, and we see far greater value in applying the best of their advances to the very specific challenges of advertising technology.
Our ambition is to be among the first to recognise where those advances can make a meaningful difference, and among the best at turning them into practical, reliable and commercially valuable capabilities.
That means continuing to invest in our existing products, bringing new AI-powered functionality to market, and working closely with customers to understand where the greatest opportunities lie.
It also means being willing to challenge some of our own assumptions about how advertising software should work.
After all, if we were designing some of today's advertising processes from scratch, with the technology now available to us, would we really design them in quite the same way?
I doubt it.
An exciting time to be in this industry
As a business we have been involved in innovating advertising technology for more than two decades, and I can't recall a time when the possibilities have felt quite so significant.
There will undoubtedly be challenges. Not every AI application will deliver what it promises, and getting the balance right between automation, human judgement and commercial control will matter enormously.
But I'm confident about where we're heading, and particularly excited about what our team and our customers can achieve together.
To our colleagues, thank you for the curiosity, commitment and willingness to embrace change that have brought us this far.
And to our customers, thank you for the trust you place in us, the challenges you bring us and the opportunity to be part of your businesses.
The technology is changing. The possibilities are expanding. And our ambition for what adserve can help you achieve is greater than ever.
Times they are a-changing.
Our commitment to innovation, and to our customers, never will.
James Foley
CEO, adserve Ltd
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