Q&A: Kargo adding agentic orchestration

March 31, 2026

As seen in Tipsheet AI

Ad tech company Kargo announced the closed beta of its emerging agentic solution called “Project KERA” as the company refines its positioning at the intersection of creative and curated supply.

Kargo described its “agentic” workflow automation — with an emphasis on intelligence — in a release: “AI agents orchestrate planning, creative development, audience and contextual intelligence, activation and in-flight optimization. The platform is powered by Kargo’s Creative Science, which applies predictive scoring and performance insights trained on years of campaign data to improve creative quality and outcomes before and during a campaign.”

Hershey, travel media network Navigator, and Wpromote are among the early testers, according to the company.

Read: “Kargo Launches Closed Beta of Project KERA, an Agentic Media Buying Platform Built for Creative Performance” (March 31) – press release

Kargo CEO Harry Kargman answered a selection of follow-up questions from tipsheet via email.

tipsheet: You’re positioning Project Kera as an agentic media buying platform – where does it sit relative to DSPs like The Trade Desk’s Kokai or Amazon Ads’ Ads Agent? Are you replacing the DSP, or orchestrating across them?

Harry Kargman, Kargo: We’re not trying to be another DSP.  Programmatic in general will be disrupted.  Kera is built from scratch from the ground up to orchestrate the best way to drive results using a combination of creative, targeting, supply and audiences in a single system across both biddable and non-biddable inventory.  Think of a team being able to buy a combination of Instagram ads, CTV pause ads, 15-second spots using TikTok assets, campaigns targeted by Amazon data via the Amazon DSP which is inside of Kera, and digital-out-of-home spots organized by the outcomes the brand is looking for.  You can plug in existing audiences and measurement tools. Over time, it’s a simpler, more complete way to buy media without stitching together disparate tools across all channels with little transparency across the entire picture. We believe that AI makes this possible and we are looking to be that single holistic platform.

When you say AI agents handle planning through optimization, what decisions are actually being made autonomously today? And where are humans still in the loop?

Kargo Agents are already handling things like interpreting briefs, assembling creative, mapping audiences, and optimizing performance in real time.  We’ve spent a lot of time and have been very intentional about where and how to keep humans in the loop.  We want humans to make the critical decisions like creative approval, start and stop dates, amount to be spent, selection of the criteria that defines success, the clear “go” message to activate the campaign and spend money, and approval on optimization strategies. This is about augmentation, not replacement.

Kera is built around what you call ‘Creative Science.’ Does that mean creative, not bidding, becomes the primary lever of performance in your system?

Creative, and dynamic creative, has always been the most undervalued contributor to performance and the biggest lever, but the industry has treated creative and media as two separate systems. Historically, media optimization has had to compensate for weak or static creative, while creative has lacked real feedback loops for live media performance. That is the structural tension that Project Kera is designed to solve.  We will absolutely support audiences and the right contextual signals and carefully curate supply, but creative is the additional factor that unlocks outcomes.

Kera operationalizes standard behavioral media targeting by bringing curation, contextual targeting and ongoing creative optimization to ensure much better outcomes for the advertiser.  Assets can adapt in flight and be used to try new places where there is less competition rather than stay fixed on standard media placements. This leads to more sustained campaigns, reduced fatigue, and more efficient performance over time.

Your predictive scoring is trained on historical campaign data… what proprietary signals does Kargo have that a DSP or retail media network doesn’t?

Kargo’s predictive scoring isn’t just trained on historical campaign data but uses our tag on page and our deeper publisher integrations to give us significantly more signals that what a DSP typically sees with a standard header bidder integration or what is passed in the bidstream.  Kargo has always been an SSP that integrates proprietary rich media formats onto publisher pages.  Our technical roots come from building out the sites and placements for major publishers.  We bring together the tech capabilities, deep integrations and on-page signals as well as years and years of trial and error across so much creative performance data.  This collectively gives us deep insights on how to find performance and unlock value for the advertiser. On top of that, we layer in audience intelligence through our cohort models, which are embedded directly across our premium inventory network.

The signal set is immense and proprietary outside of the programmatic ecosystem.   We are leveraging all of this unique data and signals to drive outcomes and are seeing incredible lift around attention, purchase intent, VCR, CTR, and optimizing ROAS.

If this model works, what does media buying look like in two to three years… are planners still building plans, or just approving what agents generate?

The role shifts from building plans with clear directives to guiding how brands show up across digital surfaces, measuring clear outcomes. Agents will handle the heavy lifting from brief to execution, and planners will focus on defining goals, creative optimization, updating strategies, and clarifying approvals and when human decision-making must happen. You’re still very much in control, but you’re not spending your time stitching together workflows that should just flow across screens and platforms.