AI in media: The biggest developments of 2026 so far
AI has been one of the media industry’s biggest buzzwords in recent years. But in 2026, the conversation has shifted from AI being a potentially useful tool, to now being embedded into the industry’s infrastructure.
From agencies building operating systems around the technology, and platforms developing AI-powered advertising products, to publishers fighting to retain control over their content and regulators beginning to set boundaries around its use, its impact is being felt across the board.
The scale of the opportunity is reflected in IAB UK research, which forecasts that AI-driven adspend in the UK will hit £18bn in 2030, accounting for around 32% of all digital adspend.
With the technology developing so quickly, here are the biggest AI developments shaping media and advertising so far this year.
Agency groups’ AI platforms
The largest global ad agencies have increasingly released AI tools aimed at improving workflow efficiency and making it easier for a wider range of clients to engage with creative and media services.
In April, as part of an effort to collate the agency groups’ AI announcements, The Media Leader compiled a list of their platforms, along with a cross-section of the additional AI tools currently offered to clients.
Since then, the agency AI arms race has continued.
Publicis Group acquired LiveRamp in May for $2.2bn – the third largest acquisition in its history. CEO Arthur Sadoun positioned the deal as part of the holding group’s strategy to develop leading agentic solutions.
In June, Stagwell announced The Media Machine, a full lifecycle agentic media operating system built on its AI platform The Machine. The company says it uses more than 20 intelligent agents alongside human expertise to optimise campaigns and improve media investment efficiency.
Partnerships have also proliferated. WPP was named the first launch partner to pilot Meta’s creative solution with its agentic marketing platform WPP Open, while the agency’s expanded partnership with Google has brought Google’s Earth AI models and datasets into the platform.
Omnicom, meanwhile, expanded its global partnership with Adobe to co-develop an enterprise-grade, industry-specialised AI Agentic Operating Model.
Taken together, these moves suggest that the agency groups are increasingly competing on the AI infrastructure underpinning their businesses, and the challenge now is to offer a genuine point of differentiation in the market.
Ads on ChatGPT
Perhaps the clearest sign that AI is becoming part of the media ecosystem is the arrival of advertising on ChatGPT.
At the start of the year, OpenAI announced it would be introducing ads to its LLM.
The move attracted criticism from Anthropic, which ran Super Bowl ads promising to keep its Claude chatbot ad-free. Perplexity also said it would not pursue ads after removing them from its interface in late 2025.
OpenAI began its US pilot in February and subsequently expanded testing to other markets, including the UK.
During the pilot, it has also introduced a self-serve Ads Manager, cost-per-click (CPC) bidding on top of the extant cost-per-mille impressions (CPM) model, and is developing its measurement capabilities.
The move marks a potentially significant new advertising environment, with OpenAI increasingly building out the infrastructure for advertisers to buy and measure campaigns on ChatGPT.
At Cannes Lions, The Media Leader senior reporter Jack Benjamin spoke to OpenAI’s VP of monetisation, Benji Shomair, about the company’s decision to introduce ads. Shomair said OpenAI’s philosophy for its ads business is “user value and privacy first, advertiser value second”.
At the same time, Google is reshaping search around AI, as it outlined several developments at its annual Marketing Live event. This included new ad formats across AI Mode and Search, the expansion of its Universal Commerce Protocol, and an “Ask Advisor” AI marketing assistant.
OpenAI wants $100bn of ad revenue. But it can’t ‘guarantee’ brand safety
Media owner’s AI tension
Media owners have increasingly turned to AI both to make advertising more accessible and to develop commercial products. But the technology is also threatening some of the economics on which their businesses depend.
In 2025, Channel 4 and ITV launched generative AI tools to help smaller businesses create TV ads. This year, Sky Media subsequently launched an AI-powered creative toolkit aimed at reducing the cost and complexity of TV advertising.
For publishers, however, the AI battle has largely centred on copyright and declining traffic, with Google’s AI Overviews having a knock-on effect on ad revenue.
In February, the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition (SPUR) was formed to find “transparent and scalable” ways to formalise how journalism can be used by AI tools in a way that protects publishers’ intellectual property.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has also imposed new conduct requirements for Google Search, compelling the tech giant to allow publishers to opt out of their content being used to power AI features and ensure publisher content is properly attributed in AI-generated results.
However, Google has begun experimenting with ways to send users back to publishers from its AI-generated results. In July, it started promoting news publishers through a ‘Top Stories’ link in some AI Overviews covering news-related queries.
The move could help restore some lost referral traffic, but if publishers have opted out of allowing their content to be used in AI Overviews then they may miss out.
How publishers are fighting to protect their copyright from AI companies
Regulation and raising concerns
As AI adoption has accelerated, so too has pressure on governments and regulators to intervene.
The EU AI Act implemented its latest major update on 2 August, when the majority of its rules and enforcement provisions became applicable. While the Act does not apply directly to the UK, its effects will still be felt, as seen in Anthropic’s announcement that it will watermark content produced by Claude to comply with the regulation.
In March, the UK Government abandoned a proposed copyright exception that would have allowed AI companies to train models on copyrighted works unless publishers explicitly opted out. Publishing industry bodies that spent two years lobbying the Government against watering down copyright restrictions for AI companies welcomed the decision.
Beyond regulation, concerns about AI’s wider impact on the information ecosystem have grown. In April, the United Nations and Conscious Advertising Network issued a brief warning that AI in advertising risks fuelling an information crisis.
Charlotte Scadden, senior advisor on information integrity at the UN, came on The Media Leader podcast to discuss risks of AI in “accelerating the breakdown of information ecosystem integrity”.
At Cannes Lions, the Unstereotype Alliance, a coalition of advertising businesses led by UN Women, launched its first AI framework for responsible advertising, warning that AI could exacerbate existing inequalities in advertising creative.
Meanwhile, IAB UK argued in its May white paper, Powering Growth: Why Digital Advertising must be central to the UK’s AI Ambitions, that digital advertising has acted as a “frontier adopter” of AI, and the industry should be seen as a “critical partner” to the Government in its ambition to “win the AI race”.
Why the United Nations is asking advertisers to protect the open web
Environmental impact
The environmental impact of AI is becoming another important part of the industry’s debate.
IAB Europe’s State of Readiness: Sustainability in Digital Advertising Report 2026 identified AI content ingestion and traffic as leading concerns.
Yet a March investigation by The Media Leader found the industry still lacks a full picture of the carbon impact of AI tools. Media businesses often struggle to obtain accurate and transparent emissions data from suppliers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, or Google.
A survey last month found that only one-third of marketers claim to fully measure the carbon impact of their AI usage. 51toCarbonZero CEO Richard Davis told The Media Leader that marketers can “only measure what suppliers are willing to disclose”.
The Media Leader investigation: AI push outpaces carbon transparency in advertising
Want to learn more?
It seems that the next stage of AI in media is no longer just about experimentation. The technology is becoming embedded into the systems that plan campaigns, sell advertising, distribute journalism and measure audiences. At the same time, questions over copyright, carbon, transparency, bias and accountability are becoming harder to separate from commercial decisions.
Want to delve deeper into the conversation? Join former The Media Leader editor-in-chief Omar Oakes and former dentsu CEO, turned AI strategist Hamish Nicklin on the podcast with their AI mini-series, Believe it or Not. The pair discuss whether AI is really to blame for job cuts, whether it will replace human media planners, and whether it will lead to a decline in creative talent.
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