AI sales teams? Ok - this is getting close to home. I can't quite work out whether I like this or not.
Prebid - the open source project that standardised header bidding back in 2017 (if that means nothing to you: it basically forced ad buyers to compete fairly for publisher inventory instead of getting first dibs based on who had the best relationship with Google)... anyway, Prebid has now released an AI sales agent for publishers.
The idea is that AI agents on the buy side and sell side can negotiate direct deals without humans.
Now, what I find interesting is that even the big publishers - Telegraph, Guardian - are operating with a fraction of the sales teams they had a decade ago. They're still winning awards and doing brilliant creative work, but there are far fewer people doing it. And on the agency side, the specialist publisher buying teams who used to pick up the phone about a £20k sponsorship have been merged into trading desks years ago.
The middle is worse. The regional titles, the specialist B2B sites, the quality niche publishers - they've cut their sales teams to the bone and there's often nobody left on the other end to call anyway.
Those deals didn't go to programmatic because advertisers chose cheap - they went there because there was nobody left to have the conversation, and this is an attempt to rebuild that infrastructure with AI instead of humans.
And look, if it works, suddenly a £5k sponsorship that's no longer worth it for a time poor sales team suddenly becomes viable again. The quality cycling blog for MAMILs can pitch to Rapha's buying agent without needing a London sales team. The mid-tier publisher gets a route to market that isn't just dumping inventory into an exchange at commodity rates.
My biggest worry though is that agents will optimise for matching the brief, when the best sales people I've worked with optimised for challenging it. "You think you want X, but actually Y would deliver the outcome you're really after." I'm not sure that fits in a schema.
I'm genuinely unsure if this is exciting or depressing. Probably both.