As with prior tech disruptions in advertising, consumers and businesses’ rapid adoption of AI will be a growth engine, a source of discontinuity, and an accelerant for the many tectonic shifts already underway across the ecosystem. Three-quarters of advertisers we surveyed expect AI to increase total media spend, and one-third believe it will drive at least a 10 percent increase in return on ad spend (ROAS). At the same time, spend may continue to move away from the open web, while direct media deals that bypass agencies and programmatic intermediaries gain share.

For the last two decades, digital advertising has followed a relatively straightforward model: Brands paid to access available consumer attention—whether through a search result, webpage, or ad slot—and a growing number of tech and data intermediaries and marketing services providers connected the buyers of attention to the sellers. The system was built for a clearly segmented consumer funnel, human decision-making, and significant data asymmetry and fragmentation.

That model is beginning to change. A growing share of consumers now use AI tools to research and decide what to buy, and over time, agentic purchasing decisions may happen with limited active human input. Advertisers already feel the shift: More than 50 percent report they believe AI has reshaped discovery and consideration.

The result is that success for a marketer is no longer just about securing data-driven impressions with brand-controlled creative. Increasingly, it is about being surfaced, recommended, and selected by the systems shaping what consumers see and buy. Drawing on proprietary research, a survey of advertising decision-makers, and interviews with experts across the advertising economy, this article examines how AI is reshaping the advertising economy, where value is moving across the ecosystem, and what leaders can do to reposition for advantage. Given how rapidly the technology and its impacts are evolving, the article only reflects our perspective and the state of the market as of June 2026.

Three AI shifts are redefining media and advertising

Among the many ways AI is transforming the advertising ecosystem, three stand out as the most important.

1. Attention and traffic are consolidating into AI environments

Consumer discovery is increasingly moving from the open web into AI-driven environments. Over 50 percent of Google searches now include an AI-generated overview, while 20 to 50 percent of traffic from traditional open-web search could be at risk by 2030. This is not limited to the open web; arguably, the larger shift is happening inside walled gardens—social media and other tech platforms combining discovery, buying, measurement, audience data, and transaction visibility in one environment. AI ranking now shapes most consumer attention on the biggest integrated platforms: More than 50 percent of content viewed on Instagram and more than 95 percent of watch time on TikTok now come from algorithmic-generated feeds rather than followed accounts. Meta has reported that AI-driven recommendations lifted time spent on Facebook by 5 percent in Q3 2025 and watch time on Instagram Reels in the United States by more than 30 percent (versus the prior year).

Across the open web and walled gardens alike, brand visibility increasingly depends on how a small set of AI systems source, rank, and recommend. As one marketing leader notes, “Brands have to work on becoming a cited source … so that AI can pick up their content and put it as a relevant answer.”

2. AI agents are increasingly helping to drive decision-making

Two distinct shifts are underway on either side of the ad transaction. On the advertiser side, more than 90 percent of advertisers state they use AI to plan media, set budgets, optimize targeting, and generate creative. On the consumer side, AI is increasingly mediating the purchase itself: Shopping agents and AI assistants rank products, compare alternatives, and in some cases complete transactions on the user’s behalf. In select early deployments, AI-enabled shopping and recommendation experiences have delivered up to 60 percent higher conversion rates. Over the next few years, 10 to 35 percent of e-commerce transactions could be initiated, influenced, or completed through AI-native experiences, though the precise role of stand-alone shopping agents versus retailer-integrated AI tools remains uncertain.

3. Value may be concentrating inside platforms bundling data, measurement, and transactions

As attention, decision-making, buying, conversion, and measurement move to integrated environments, value may be increasingly concentrated among the AI-native platforms and walled gardens that bundle these capabilities into a single AI-managed product—and shifting away from the intermediaries (exchanges, ad networks, traditional agencies) that historically connected buyers and signals separately.

This could increase advertisers’ dependence on platform-provided data, making measurement even more opaque. But advertisers could also lose visibility and control over where their ads actually run across products, placements, and channels within a single platform. Forty-two percent of advertisers we surveyed cite reliance on these “black box optimization” systems as a key risk AI introduces into their media investment strategy.