StackAdapt today opened its 2026 Innovation Forum, a virtual event running today for North America and on September 30 for EMEA and Asia-Pacific, with Benji Shomair, the OpenAI executive whose remit covers its advertising business, scheduled to speak on ChatGPT advertising and Ivy Studio placed at the center of what the Toronto company calls its connected AI suite. Recordings move on demand from October 1.

In Short

StackAdapt, a company that sells software for buying ads, is holding an online event today and on September 30 where its executives and outside guests, including a senior OpenAI manager, discuss how AI is changing advertising. It matters because StackAdapt already offers its advertisers access to ads inside ChatGPT and builds parts of its own product on OpenAI's models, so the OpenAI session puts a partner and supplier on a customer's stage. The announcement names no new product, price or release date, so what you get is a set of talks and a look at tools that already exist, with recordings available from October 1.

What is on the programme

StackAdapt issued the announcement from Toronto through Business Wire at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time today, on the morning of the first broadcast. According to StackAdapt, the Innovation Forum is its annual global event on where advertising is heading and what that shift means for marketers, and this year's edition carries the title "How AI is Reshaping the Next Era of Advertising." The North American broadcast runs today. EMEA and Asia-Pacific audiences receive theirs on September 30, and all programming becomes available on demand from October 1, according to the company.

The document is not fully consistent about the first session. Its body assigns today's broadcast to North America, while the list of on-demand experiences at the foot of the same release labels it the Global Broadcast, set beside separate EMEA and Asia-Pacific broadcasts on September 30. No start times, time zones, running times or registration figures appear anywhere in the release, and it does not say whether every session is repeated in each regional broadcast.

The running order is set out in more detail. Vitaly Pecherskiy, co-founder and chief executive, opens with StackAdapt's view of how advertising is changing. Yang Han, co-founder and chief technology officer, and Anna Grodecka-Grad, senior vice president of client services, follow with a session on how the company's latest products put that view into practice, according to StackAdapt. Two outside speakers complete the list. Harper Carroll, described in the release as an AI and machine learning computer scientist and educator, covers what separates the teams pulling ahead, how to recognise opportunities worth pursuing and which habits help fold AI into everyday work. Shomair then takes the emergence of ChatGPT advertising, working practices for the new channel and what comes next for marketers.

Ryan Nelsen, StackAdapt's chief marketing officer, framed the event as a look forward rather than a product day. "AI is changing much more than how quickly marketers can complete individual tasks. It is changing how advertising itself operates," Nelsen said. "The decisions marketers make across planning, creative, audiences, activation, and measurement are increasingly connected. Innovation Forum is about looking ahead at what that means for our industry and showing marketers how they can prepare for what comes next."

Three ties to one supplier

Shomair's session is the most concrete item on the agenda, and it rests on a relationship with three layers.

The first is media. On May 5, 2026, StackAdapt joined OpenAI's ChatGPT advertising pilot as a technology partner, one of five alongside Criteo, Kargo, Adobe and Pacvue, on the same day OpenAI opened its self-serve Ads Manager to US businesses. The second is infrastructure. When StackAdapt released Ivy Studio on July 28, it disclosed that it uses OpenAI's language models to build advertising-specific capabilities, without naming the models, the components that run on them or how those calls interact with client campaign data. The third arrives today: a senior OpenAI commercial executive addressing StackAdapt's audience about a channel StackAdapt already offers its advertisers.

Shomair is not a peripheral figure in that channel. He joined OpenAI as vice president of monetization in December 2025, with a remit covering ads, commerce and apps, and his LinkedIn posts have carried most of the company's market activations since: the United Kingdom on June 6, India on August 29 and, last week, seven Asian markets that took the count past 60 countries. OpenAI's own help page listed 63 on September 24.

The channel has grown quickly from a narrow start. The pilot began on February 9, 2026 at a $60 CPM with a $200,000 minimum commitment. By August 31, Digiday was reporting a $1 billion annualised run rate reached in under 200 days, a projection from one month's revenue rather than booked annual sales. Routes into the inventory have multiplied along the way. Adform was named a technology partner for the European rollout on September 10, and on September 16 OpenAI wired ChatGPT Ads into HubSpot and Shopify, putting a campaign builder inside a CRM and an ecommerce platform used by businesses with no media team.

That leaves an open question over the technology partner route. When the seven Asian markets went live, neither OpenAI document stated whether Criteo, StackAdapt, Kargo, Adobe and Pacvue could route budgets into them. The release for today's event does not address it either. A broadcast carrying OpenAI's own session on the channel is an obvious place for the answer to surface, if that session runs in the EMEA and Asia-Pacific broadcasts at all.

Ivy Studio at the center

According to StackAdapt, the forum showcases its latest AI work with Ivy Studio "at the center of its connected AI suite," and attendees will see capabilities across creative and campaign workflows intended to reduce operational friction and link decisions across the advertising lifecycle. The phrase connected AI suite is not defined. No other component of the suite is named, and nothing in the release indicates whether the features on show are new since July.

The product history is short. StackAdapt released Ivy, an in-platform assistant, on July 9, 2025, reporting roughly 1,700 in-platform messages in the 30 days before release. Ivy Studio followed on July 28, 2026 as a natural-language hub covering planning, forecasting, analysis, optimization and execution inside the company's demand-side platform. Two disclosures anchored that release: StackAdapt employees run more than 15,000 AI-assisted workflows a week through Ivy, and close to 70 percent of Ivy Studio usage concentrates in its top 20 workflows. Both figures describe the vendor's own staff and a narrow band of repeated tasks rather than customer adoption. Pricing, general availability dates and customer counts went unpublished.

One detail separates today's description from July's. Creative workflows appear in the forum release; they were absent from the five functions StackAdapt listed for Ivy Studio in July. Is that an addition to the product, or a looser description of the suite? The release does not say.

The competitive field has filled out around it. PubMatic opened AgenticOS with live campaigns running on January 5, 2026, and Yahoo DSP embedded agents that run campaign operations the following day. StackAdapt's weekly workflow count remains a usage figure of a kind The Trade Desk has not published for its Koa Agents. Interoperability is unresolved as well. In August, IAB Tech Lab found rival agentic advertising protocols overlapping on 13 functions, while the July Ivy Studio release referred to no external agent protocol at all. For agencies spreading spend across four or five platforms, the value of agentic AI inside one closed system depends on how much of a media plan that system actually holds.

Beyond productivity, by StackAdapt's own measure

The release's central claim is that AI's role reaches past task automation. According to StackAdapt, the forum examines AI's "broader role in connecting how advertising is planned, created, activated, and measured," including "where AI can create business value beyond productivity gains." The company's own research supplies a baseline for that claim, and it is not a flattering one.

The AI Delegation Gap report, published on August 19, drew on a NewtonX survey of 500 marketing and advertising professionals fielded between May 19 and June 8, 2026, plus a separate survey of 187 StackAdapt clients. Reported benefits concentrated in workflow: 62 percent cited reduced manual optimization time and 56 percent faster campaign setup, while 27 percent cited improved return on ad spend and 22 percent lower cost per click. Comfort fell as authority rose. Ninety percent accepted AI recommending actions, 78 percent accepted AI acting within rules set by people, and 50 percent accepted AI operating autonomously once its performance had been proven. Only 6 percent said they act on in-platform AI recommendations almost always, and 19 percent described their AI tools as fully integrated into their workflows.

The regional split maps neatly onto a forum organised by region. North American respondents were the least likely to act on platform recommendations often or almost always, at 47 percent, against 59 percent in EMEA and 60 percent in APAC. The sample limits those cuts, though. North America supplied 300 of the 500 respondents, the United Kingdom 72 of the 100 EMEA respondents, and Australia 84 of the 100 in APAC.

Nelsen's second statement in today's release leans the other way, toward handing more of the operation to software. "The future of advertising is more adaptive and interconnected, and marketers need technology that can help them operate that way," Nelsen said. "We're building toward a future where technology manages more of the operational complexity so marketers can focus their time and expertise on the decisions that drive their businesses forward." Half of the company's own survey sample, asked about autonomous AI with proven results, declined.

On measurement, StackAdapt's answer so far is transaction data. Its Economic Impact Report, released on July 30, connects ad exposure through modeled attribution to Affinity Solutions data covering more than 150 million credit and debit cards and more than $4 trillion in aggregate spend, aimed first at travel marketers, destination organisations and tourism boards. According to StackAdapt, the tool lets advertisers "move beyond post-campaign studies and proxy metrics" while campaigns are still live. Card panels have a known boundary: cash transactions and purchases on cards outside a panel do not appear.

The workforce session

Carroll's slot addresses the other side of the same gap: the people expected to absorb the tools. The evidence here is mixed. Acquia research published last week found only 41 percent of CMOs confident their team can govern AI. In Asia-Pacific, Omnicom's PHD disclosed productivity gains of just 10 to 20 percent from AI, with the question of who pays for model usage left open. Certification and training programs have spread across the industry, yet upskilling has so far produced familiarity with AI tools rather than willingness to delegate decisions to them, as the 6 percent figure from StackAdapt's own survey suggests.

A session on habits is a softer offering than a product demonstration, and the release gives no indication of whether Carroll will draw on StackAdapt data or on her own material.

A busy September for StackAdapt

Today's forum closes a crowded month. On September 10, Genius Sports, Equativ and StackAdapt put live sports moment triggers into StackAdapt's buying platform as curated Deal IDs, drawing on Genius Sports coverage of more than 400 leagues and federations and packaged as a Genius Deal Library and a Custom High-Impact option.

On September 15, StackAdapt named Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify, a strategic advisor. According to StackAdapt, "Finkelstein will work closely with StackAdapt's leadership team as the company enters its next phase of global growth and continues expanding its technology beyond programmatic advertising." The appointment came a day before OpenAI named Shopify as its first ecommerce partner for ChatGPT Ads. Neither StackAdapt nor OpenAI has drawn any link between the two.

What does "beyond programmatic" mean in practice? The company's own boilerplate offers the clearest answer. According to StackAdapt, the platform was built entirely in-house and unifies programmatic and owned channels, including CTV, digital out-of-home, display, native, audio and email, in one interface covering audience selection, creative personalisation, campaign execution, optimization and measurement. Email is the owned channel on that list. The paid side is where the company has spent the past year adding supply, data and compliance, from iHeartMedia broadcast radio in November 2025 to self-serve National Provider Identifier targeting for pharmaceutical advertisers on January 6, 2026 and EU-US Data Privacy Framework certification in February.

What the release leaves out

The gaps are extensive for an event billed as a first look at what shapes the future of advertising. The release names no product other than Ivy Studio, which has been public for two months. It gives no release dates, no pricing and no geographic availability for anything shown. It lists no session times, no attendance or registration figures, and no confirmation that StackAdapt's route into ChatGPT inventory covers the markets OpenAI added in August and September. Beyond the two quoted statements from Nelsen, it carries no comment from the named speakers, OpenAI included.

In that sense the document is a schedule rather than a disclosure. The substance, if there is any beyond July's Ivy Studio release and August's survey, will sit in the broadcasts themselves.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Vendor forums are where demand-side platforms set out their story for the next planning cycle, and this one pairs the platform's own AI product with the supplier of one of its newest channels. That pairing carries weight for buyers, because routes into ChatGPT inventory have multiplied faster than the evidence about them. OpenAI's own activation posts list its Ads Solutions team, agency partners, technology partners and self-serve Ads Manager, and since September 16 HubSpot and Shopify have joined them. With self-service open in all 63 listed countries, what a DSP partner adds is increasingly a question of service rather than access. StackAdapt's May announcement described strategic guidance and creative optimization as part of its service model for the channel; today's release adds nothing to that description.

The second issue is the closed design of Ivy Studio. StackAdapt's bet, as set out in July, is that domain grounding inside one platform matters more than connectivity across many. Standards bodies have moved the other way, and so have large platforms: Amazon Ads put its MCP server into open beta on February 2, 2026, and Meta opened write-access connectors to Claude and ChatGPT in April, exposing their systems to outside agents. Neither position has yet produced audited evidence of better media outcomes.

The third is measurement. StackAdapt's own survey found a 35-point distance between marketers reporting reduced manual work and marketers reporting better return on ad spend. A forum framed around "business value beyond productivity gains" invites the obvious test: whether the sessions put numbers against that phrase. The answer will be public when the recordings go on demand on October 1.

Timeline

Summary

Who: StackAdapt, the Toronto-based advertising platform, with sessions from co-founder and chief executive Vitaly Pecherskiy, co-founder and chief technology officer Yang Han and senior vice president of client services Anna Grodecka-Grad, and statements from chief marketing officer Ryan Nelsen. Outside speakers are Harper Carroll, an AI and machine learning computer scientist and educator, and Benji Shomair, vice president of monetization at OpenAI.

What: The 2026 Innovation Forum, a virtual event on how AI is changing advertising, with Ivy Studio presented as the center of StackAdapt's connected AI suite and a session from OpenAI on ChatGPT advertising. The announcement names no new product, pricing or availability date.

When: StackAdapt issued the announcement today at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. The North American broadcast runs today, EMEA and Asia-Pacific broadcasts follow on September 30, and all programming goes on demand from October 1.

Where: Online, in three regional broadcasts, organised from Toronto and distributed through Business Wire.

Why: According to StackAdapt, AI is changing how advertising operates rather than only how fast tasks are completed. The forum follows a sequence of StackAdapt releases since July and lands as ChatGPT advertising spreads to 63 listed countries, with StackAdapt tied to OpenAI as a technology partner, a customer for its models and now a host for one of its senior commercial executives.