The advertising technology business has always promised efficiency, which is another way of saying it has always promised to eliminate the need to call someone and ask what went wrong. Now Google is taking that promise to its logical conclusion: an artificial intelligence assistant that will troubleshoot your advertising campaigns so you don't have to bother a human being.
The new tool, which Google is calling Ask Ad Manager, is designed to help publishers figure out why a campaign is underperforming, how it compares to industry benchmarks, and where in the platform's labyrinthine interface they might go to fix it. Testing began in mid-June with publishers including Yahoo, which has integrated the assistant into its own systems.
"Agentic capabilities are transforming the ad tech industry as we know it," Peentoo Patel, a senior product management director at Google, wrote in a blog post announcing the tool. (The word "agentic," for those keeping score, refers to artificial intelligence systems that can act somewhat independently, a concept that has become extremely popular in Silicon Valley boardrooms this year.)
Mr. Patel described a longer-term vision in which autonomous AI tools handle not just troubleshooting but inventory discovery, pricing and even multiparty negotiations — the sort of work that has traditionally required account managers, sales representatives and the occasional tense phone call.
For now, Ask Ad Manager will not make decisions on its own; it will merely suggest changes that a human must then implement. Google expects that limitation to change as the technology develops, which is the kind of sentence that advertising executives have been reading with increasing frequency and, one suspects, mixed feelings.
The company plans to release additional developer tools later this year. The machines, it seems, are learning to do the jobs that explain what the other machines are doing.
Original story published in MediaPost: "Google's Chatbot Troubleshoots Ad Campaigns"