EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Deck Outlines The Trade Desk's Agentic Plans for H2 2026

The Trade Desk is building a central AI conversational interface that will route media buyers towards a growing roster of specialized agents, according to a leaked product roadmap obtained by ADWEEK. The system, called Ask Koa, built alongside the company’s Kokai Zuma release, is designed to give advertisers a single conversational entry point to a range of AI agents that can handle parts of the programmatic workflow, including audience building, campaign creation, insights, troubleshooting, as well as help and search functions. The roadmap shows the interface is moving from alpha to closed beta this week, with additional agents planned. The Trade Desk confirmed that customers are already testing this interface and said it plans to expand access to more clients over the next six weeks. “We want to make sure that the answers or the guidance that Ask Koa gives the user is 100% accurate,” Eric Bosco, VP, product management, The Trade Desk, told ADWEEK. Bosco declined to say how many advertisers are participating in the closed beta or provide specific performance metrics, but said troubleshooting campaigns for ad buyers is already faster with Ask Koa. The demand-side-platform began publicly previewing its AI chatbot in a blog post last week. The leaked deck, titled ‘2H Roadmap & Q3 Release Highlights,’ provides a broader look at how the company plans to build out that system, alongside supply-side tools for deal management and inventory pricing, and a redesign of the platform's advertisers, campaign, and ad group views. Among the notable features in the roadmap is Koa for Frequency, a Trader Tool scheduled to move from alpha to closed beta by Aug 25. The tool is designed to automatically adjust how often a person sees an ad based on campaign pacing and performance data, rather than requiring an advertiser to manually update frequency caps. “Koa for Frequency helps increase unique reach where it can,” the deck reads. The Trade Desk has spent months signalling a deeper push into agentic AI. On its second-quarter earnings call, CEO Jeff Green told investors “agentic is one of the biggest opportunities that advertising will ever see,” and that the company is already “seeing massive advantage from it.” That messaging builds on Green's earlier remarks at Marketecture in March, where he said the company is running a closed beta with some advertisers to create campaigns through Anthropic’s Claude. An announcement in April confirmed that the agency network Stagwell would be the first partner on Koa Agents. Media buying is transitioning into greater automation capabilities as adtech companies compete to establish themselves as the platform through which quick and reliable automated transactions will happen. Amazon, for example, began opening parts of its adtech stack to AI agents earlier this year. For The Trade Desk, the push also comes with a more immediate business imperative: making its platform easier for media buyers to use after a faltering adoption of its Kokai user interface. Buyers have previously moved millions of ad dollars from The Trade Desk to Amazon over the product frustration. “A large majority of the input to our product runway process comes from customer feedback,” Bosco said. “We started the year with a list of things that we wanted to accomplish for our customers to make the experience materially better from what they had. We wanted to make the experience materially better on a number of dimensions—one of them on hitting performance of the campaigns, like better KPIs.” The internal roadmap suggests that simplifying how buyers interact with the platform is becoming a central part of that effort. “We’ve really focused on removing the drudgery from the account managers and giving time back to [them] to focus on things like campaign performance,” Bosco said. See the pitch deck below. H2_Roadmap_ _Q3_Release_Highlights_Deck_Platform_and_Supply_Only_2026Download

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EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Deck Outlines The Trade Desk's Agentic Plans for H2 2026

The Trade Desk and its rivals race to determine how AI agents will reshape the way advertisers plan, buy, and optimize media

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