NEW YORK (July 23, 2026) — Agentic AI is making real advancements in media buying, but it is still in its infancy. To date, AI agents have handled important tasks such as deal discovery, audience discovery, and basic campaign activation. With this announcement, agentic AI takes on one of the most time-consuming, labor-intensive parts of media buying: optimizing campaigns in-flight.
Dstillery, the predictive AI company, today announced an agentic advertising partnership with Canvas Worldwide, the second-largest U.S. independent media agency. As an early design and innovation partner, Canvas Worldwide has worked alongside Dstillery to help shape agentic solutions like Dstillery’s DS-1 platform to improve every part of the end-to-end media investment workflow, and is now extending that innovation to campaign optimization with the first in-flight agentic optimization of a live programmatic campaign.
Rather than replacing traders, DS-1 was designed to augment their expertise by surfacing optimization opportunities continuously instead of waiting for scheduled reporting cycles.
The optimization capability was co-developed by cross-functional teams from both organizations, bringing together Dstillery’s AI expertise with Canvas Worldwide’s AI Applied Research & Technology group, led on the development side by Developer Lead Britain Eriksen, whose frontline experience helped inform how the solution fits into real-world media workflows. The workflow was designed and refined alongside Canvas traders to mirror how media teams actually evaluate campaign performance while reducing repetitive tasks.
Before DS-1, optimization was a manual chore. Traders pulled reports on a weekly or monthly cadence and judged by hand what was working, what wasn’t, and what to change, and by the time a problem showed up in a report, it had already cost impressions and budget. With DS-1, campaign performance is monitored continuously. DS-1 identifies which parts of a campaign are outperforming, takes learnings from them, and recommends refinements to lift the parts that are lagging. The trader can accept, reject, or tune every recommendation, keeping full control while DS-1 makes sure they’re looking at the right opportunity at the right time.
“There is no shortage of conversations about how AI could transform our industry. At Canvas, we’ve been focused on moving beyond the conversation to thoughtfully apply agentic AI to real media investment workflows,” explains Sally Lee, SVP, Programmatic and Activation Technologies at Canvas Worldwide. “Our partnership with Dstillery reflects that philosophy — using AI where it creates measurable value and amplifies strategic work for clients, while keeping our experts at the center of every investment decision.”
For Canvas Worldwide, in-flight optimization represents the next phase of a broader AI strategy focused on embedding agentic intelligence throughout the media buying process. That includes everything from planning and activation to optimization, all with human expertise remaining at the center of every decision.
“Campaign optimization is one of the most manual parts of a media buyer’s job, especially when you’re managing multiple campaigns across multiple brands,” said Mark Jung, Head of AI Products at Dstillery. “DS-1 gives traders that time back, and more importantly, it helps them make better decisions, faster to drive outcomes for the brands they serve.”
