The Trade Desk is testing whether advertisers can build campaigns on its platform using generative AI.
Speaking at Marketecture Live in New York City on Wednesday, CEO Jeff Green said the company is running a closed beta that allows some advertisers to create campaigns through Anthropic’s Claude—offering an early glimpse at how the company is exploring large language models to potentially reshape programmatic ad buying. Green stopped short of sharing further details about the test.
The effort follows The Trade Desk’s earnings last month, when Green hinted the company plans to launch an agentic AI framework for partners in 2026. At the panel, he argued programmatic advertising is especially well suited to automation given the scale and speed of campaign decisions.
“I don’t think that there is an industry in the world that is more conducive to AI than programmatic advertising,” Green said during a panel with Marketecture Media founder Ari Paparo. “We are looking at 20 million ad impression opportunities every single second, representing millions of ad campaigns and billions of users on the other side—and we have 10 milliseconds or less.”
Ad companies are in an arms race to deploy AI agents that could shake off old habits on building and managing campaigns. Rivals such as Amazon have already begun opening parts of their ad tech stack to AI agents, ADWEEK previously reported.
The Trade Desk’s efforts with Claude follow Green’s recent remarks suggesting that the company would gain access to chatbot inventory. While he did not confirm whether that includes AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, he also declined to comment on the company’s reported talks with OpenAI.
Instead, he suggested that the economics of generative AI will push many companies toward advertising as they search for sustainable revenue models.
