There was a time when an advertising executive could reasonably expect to know where the money went. That time appears to be receding.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has revised its forecast for United States advertising spending upward, to 12.3 percent growth this year, from a previous estimate of 9.5 percent. David Cohen, the chief executive of the trade group, attributed the rosier outlook to strong spending around the Winter Olympics and the World Cup, along with what he called "increasingly powerful tools" available to advertisers.

Those tools, it turns out, are doing quite a lot of the work themselves. According to estimates from the research consultancy Madison & Wall, the share of advertising dollars spent through automated or artificial intelligence campaign types will rise to 12 percent of United States spending this year — up from 2 percent in 2023. By 2030, the consultancy projects, AI-directed spending will reach $158 billion, or 27 percent of the domestic market.

"This is a share shift," said Luke Stillman, a managing director at Madison & Wall, in a formulation that manages to be both obvious and alarming.

The platforms have made opting in rather easy. Meta, Google, Reddit, Pinterest and TikTok each offer automated campaign formats, and according to the digital agency Tinuiti, Google's Performance Max campaigns have accounted for 60 to 70 percent of spending among retail clients since late last year. Close to one-third of Google's search spending now uses AI Max or Performance Max, while Meta's Advantage+ campaigns are on track to handle $75 billion this year.

"It's a pretty easy box to check," said Danny Weisman, a co-founder of the independent media agency Obsessed, summarizing the appeal with admirable economy.

Not everyone is sanguine. Becca Shih, a performance marketing specialist at the agency Roast, noted that such tools have been criticized for providing what buyers have called an inscrutable "black box." She compared the situation to using ChatGPT: give it poor context, she said, and you will get a poor answer.

(Whether that metaphor is reassuring depends, perhaps, on how often one has received a poor answer from ChatGPT.)

John Dawson, a vice president of strategy at Jellyfish, offered the longer view. "We don't think automation in media stops at 20 or 30 percent," he said. "We think it gets to 90."

The machines, in other words, are not asking for permission. They are asking for budget.

Original story published in Digiday: "Ad spend forecasts revised upward as more ad dollars are handled by AI tools"