Kenshoo Skai used its ShopAble 2026 conference in San Francisco on May 13, 2026, to position itself inside a crowded race for autonomous advertising infrastructure, unveiling what the company calls the industry's first agent-native operating system for marketing alongside expanded artificial intelligence capabilities and a separate advisory practice oriented around what it labels agentic transformation.

The announcement bundles three concurrent product moves. Kenshoo Skai Studio is a new environment in which marketing teams build, deploy, and coordinate squads of specialised AI agents that execute campaign workflows end to end. The existing Kenshoo Skai Platform picks up additional capabilities through Celeste, the company's commerce media AI agent. A separate Strategic Advisory Services team rounds out the launch, designed to walk organisations through workflow redesigns, operating model changes, and data foundation work required to run hybrid teams of humans and software agents.

According to the company, all three pieces share a single underlying infrastructure: Kenshoo Skai Data Hub, which unifies and normalises advertising and commerce data across sources so that agents operate on a consistent, decision-ready foundation. Data Hub is also being sold as a standalone product, meaning brands can adopt it independently of how they execute their media. The positioning is not accidental. By offering the data layer as a separate product, the company is signalling that customers do not need to commit to the full Skai stack to feed an agent-driven workflow.

What Kenshoo Skai Studio actually does

The Studio environment is structured around the concept of agent squads. According to the press release, these are groups of specialised AI agents that operate continuously, detecting performance shifts, diagnosing root causes, adjusting budgets, and notifying stakeholders without manual intervention.

Each agent operates within guardrails defined by the organisation. Human approval checkpoints can be embedded at any step where teams want to retain control, which addresses one of the more persistent concerns about deploying autonomous systems against live media budgets. According to Kenshoo Skai, the result is a system that runs alongside marketers continuously and at scale, rather than a single AI tool waiting to be triggered.

The architecture mirrors a pattern that has emerged across the advertising technology sector during the past nine months. Most platforms positioning around agentic capabilities have settled on a configuration in which agents handle repetitive, monitoring-heavy work while humans retain authority over significant decisions. Yahoo DSP took a similar approach when it embedded agentic AI directly into its demand-side platform on January 6, 2026, allowing AI agents to autonomously execute campaign operations with human approval where required. LiveRamp followed on March 3, 2026, deploying live agents for audience building and cross-media measurement inside its data collaboration platform.

Celeste keeps expanding

Celeste, the commerce media agent that Skai first publicly introduced in 2025, is also getting a substantial upgrade. According to the announcement, the Kenshoo Skai Platform now supports new custom agents that let teams embed AI more deeply into planning, optimisation, and analysis. The framing matters. Rather than pushing customers immediately into the full Studio environment, the platform side offers an incremental adoption path. Teams that are not ready to architect their workflows around agent squads can still introduce AI agents into specific tasks at their own pace.

Celeste is delivered through Skai's support for the Model Context Protocol, an open standard originally developed by Anthropic that enables large language models to communicate with external data sources and tools through a consistent interface. According to the company description, Kenshoo Skai supports custom AI agents via MCP, meaning customers can plug their own agents into the platform without writing bespoke integration code for each one.

The choice of MCP places Kenshoo Skai inside a fast-consolidating standard. Google released an open-source MCP server for its Ads API on October 7, 2025, enabling AI tools to query advertising campaign data through natural language. AppsFlyer launched its own MCP tool on July 17, 2025, focusing on mobile marketing measurement. Amazon Ads opened a closed beta for its MCP Server on November 13, 2025. Six advertising technology companies launched the Ad Context Protocol on October 15, 2025, itself built on Anthropic's protocol, as an industry coalition attempt to standardise how agents interact with advertising systems.

Measurement Hub and Agent-Ready Optimization

Two further capabilities ship across both the Kenshoo Skai Platform and the new Studio environment. Measurement Hub delivers what the company describes as a single, always-on view of the business impact of media across retailers, channels, and ad products. Crucially, according to the announcement, the tool tracks not just incremental revenue but sales, profit, new-to-brand customers, and lifetime value, then connects those insights directly into planning and optimisation workflows.

The second capability, Agent-Ready Optimization, is structured around budgeting, intraday optimisation, and special event planning. According to Kenshoo Skai, the tool is designed to scale with autonomous workflows over time, meaning customers can start with assisted optimisation and progressively hand more decisions to agents as governance and confidence increase.

This step-wise framing has become a recurring theme across vendors trying to sell agentic infrastructure to marketing teams that remain cautious about ceding control. Research published by Nylas in early 2026, drawing on 1,026 developers and technology leaders surveyed between December 18 and December 30, 2025, found that only 4% of teams allow agents to act without any human approval. The overwhelming majority operate in more cautious configurations, with humans approving each significant action.

Strategic Advisory Services

The third element of the launch is a consulting practice. According to Kenshoo Skai, the Strategic Advisory Services team helps organisations assess readiness, identify high-impact use cases, and redesign workflows, operating models, and data foundations to support a hybrid workforce of people and agents.

The presence of an advisory layer alongside the product is notable. Software vendors typically sell self-serve tooling and partner with system integrators for transformation work. By building the practice internally, Kenshoo Skai is acknowledging a market reality already documented in industry research: most enterprises are nowhere near ready to plug autonomous agents into their existing marketing workflows. Koddi's commissioned commerce media benchmark study, conducted by Forrester Consulting in July 2025 across 788 senior decision-makers, found that only 13% of organisations meet the criteria for trailblazers across strategy, technology, measurement and operations. Nearly half, 49%, fall into the nascent category, running pilots or informal sponsorships without consistent frameworks.

For those teams, the gap between buying an agent-native platform and actually running it productively is wide. An advisory practice attached to the product is one way to close it.

What the CEO said

Yoav Izhar-Prato, chief executive officer of Kenshoo Skai, framed the announcement in generational terms. "For more than two decades, Kenshoo Skai has helped shape the evolution of marketing technology and decision intelligence," Izhar-Prato said in the press release. "Today, we are at another defining moment with the rise of agent-native marketing."

According to the chief executive, the design intent behind Studio is workflow transformation. "With Kenshoo Skai Studio, marketers will work alongside intelligent agents that execute, optimize, and adapt in real time across channels and workflows. We believe this will fundamentally change how marketing operates, enabling individuals and teams to move with greater speed, creativity, and impact than ever before. Welcome to the age of agentic marketing."

Industry context: a crowded operating system race

The "first agent-native operating system for marketing" framing sits inside a broader trend. Through late 2025 and into 2026, advertising platforms have raced to embed autonomous systems into their infrastructure, with each settling on its own terminology and scope. PubMatic launched AgenticOS on January 5, 2026, describing the system as infrastructure designed to orchestrate autonomous advertising execution across premium digital environments, with live campaigns already running across connected television and video inventory at the time of the launch. PubMatic positioned the launch on the supply side; the AgenticOS service operates inside its sell-side platform, with WPP Media, Butler/Till, and MiQ as early participants.

Kenshoo Skai's claim is different in scope. The company's domain is commerce media and the buy side of the equation, oriented around brands and agencies coordinating campaigns across retailers, search, social, and channels. The "marketing" qualifier in its positioning is doing significant work, distinguishing the Studio launch from supply-side and pure ad tech announcements.

Other platforms have approached the same problem with different framing. Amazon announced Ads Agent at its unBoxed 2025 conference on November 11, 2025, automating campaign management tasks across Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon DSP through natural language commands. The Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab formally named its umbrella agentic initiative the Agentic Advertising Management Protocols, or AAMP, on February 26, 2026, explicitly to address what its chief executive Anthony Katsur described as confusion in the market over what agentic infrastructure actually is and how its components relate to one another.

In other words, the operating system metaphor is becoming the shared language of agentic advertising even as different vendors stake out different layers of the stack.

Skai's existing footprint

The scale of Kenshoo Skai's commercial position gives the Studio launch immediate distribution. According to the company, the platform serves more than 8,000 brands and agencies, including PepsiCo, Sanofi, Estée Lauder, Publicis, Tinuiti, and WPP. It integrates with more than 300 publishers and retail media networks, among them Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Criteo, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and TikTok. The company operates from San Francisco with nine international offices.

That distribution matters for two reasons. First, agent-native infrastructure that is not connected to the channels where money is being spent is largely theoretical. Skai's existing integrations with the major retailers and publishers mean the agents in Studio have somewhere to act. Second, the holding company client base, including Publicis, Tinuiti, and WPP, places the launch directly into agency operations.

The retail media side of Skai's business has been deepening through 2025 and into 2026. Topsort partnered with Skai on September 23, 2025, becoming the first API integration to deliver access to Topsort's portfolio of retail media networks across 40 countries through Skai's unified platform, with Celeste described in that announcement as a GenAI marketing agent designed specifically for commerce media environments.

More recently, Walmart Connect named Pacvue and Skai as technology integration partners when it announced Connect Select on April 27, 2026, a curated programmatic CTV marketplace embedded within Walmart DSP, with Skai providing reporting capabilities for advertisers managing Walmart DSP campaigns. Jeff Cohen, chief business development officer at Skai, said in that announcement that Skai's integration of Walmart DSP reporting gives advertisers a unified view of performance across search, onsite display, and offsite media.

Rollout timing

According to the press release, Kenshoo Skai Studio begins rolling out to beta partners during summer 2026. The expanded AI capabilities within the Kenshoo Skai Platform via Celeste are available starting May 13, 2026, the day of the announcement.

The phased structure is significant. By making the platform-level Celeste expansion immediately available while staging Studio behind a beta, the company gives existing customers something new to use immediately and reserves the more ambitious agent squad architecture for a controlled rollout. It also gives the company time to refine the product with beta partners before broader availability.

Why this matters for marketing teams

For brands and agencies, the practical question is not whether to adopt agentic infrastructure, but how to do so without losing visibility or governance over campaign decisions. The advertising technology industry has spent the past several months assembling the standards and protocols that make agent-to-agent and agent-to-platform communication possible. The IAB Tech Lab's agentic standards roadmap, published in January 2026, extended existing specifications including OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, VAST, and Deal API with modern protocols such as the Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent, and gRPC, with the explicit goal of preventing fragmentation across competing implementations.

That standards work has been accompanied by forecasting that places agentic AI at the centre of 2026 advertising priorities. The Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2026 Outlook Study, released on January 28, 2026, projected US advertising spend will grow 9.5% year on year, driven in part by rapid adoption of agentic AI systems capable of autonomous campaign execution. According to the IAB study, two-thirds of advertisers now focus on agentic AI for ad buying and campaign execution.

The launch of Studio adds another vendor option for marketing teams already working on this transition. Whether the agent-native framing translates into measurable performance gains, or simply repackages capabilities that existed under earlier labels, is a question the beta period is likely to test.

A second open question concerns vendor consolidation. As platforms race to position themselves as the operating system for their corner of the marketing stack, advertisers and agencies will eventually have to decide which combination of agent-native infrastructure they actually want to commit to, and which integrations matter most. Kenshoo Skai's position spans commerce media, paid search, paid social, and retail operations, which gives it a wider surface area than a pure supply-side or pure measurement vendor. Whether that breadth translates into a defensible position in the agentic era depends on how well the agents actually perform on real campaigns, and how much of the workflow customers feel comfortable handing over.

For now, what the May 13 announcement adds to the picture is a concrete claim from one of the established commerce media platforms that agent-native is the architectural direction, not just a feature label.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Kenshoo Skai, the omnichannel commerce media platform operating as a Kenshoo Ltd. brand, announced the launch. Yoav Izhar-Prato, chief executive officer of Kenshoo Skai, served as primary spokesperson. The platform serves more than 8,000 brands and agencies including PepsiCo, Sanofi, Estée Lauder, Publicis, Tinuiti, and WPP, and integrates with more than 300 publishers and retail media networks including Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Criteo, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and TikTok.

What: An agent-native operating system for marketing, comprising Kenshoo Skai Studio, an environment for building, deploying, and coordinating squads of specialised AI agents that execute campaign workflows; expanded capabilities on the existing Kenshoo Skai Platform through Celeste, the company's commerce media AI agent; Kenshoo Skai Data Hub as the unified, open data infrastructure, available as a standalone solution; Measurement Hub for tracking media impact across retailers, channels, and ad products; Agent-Ready Optimization for budgeting, intraday optimisation, and special event planning; and a new Strategic Advisory Services team focused on agentic transformation.

When: The announcement was made on May 13, 2026, at the ShopAble 2026 conference. Expanded Celeste AI capabilities within the Kenshoo Skai Platform are available starting that date. Kenshoo Skai Studio begins rolling out to beta partners during summer 2026.

Where: San Francisco, where the company is headquartered with nine international offices. The platform is deployed globally across the publishers and retail media networks it integrates with.

Why: According to Kenshoo Skai, the agent-native architecture is designed to combine advances in AI, unified data, embedded intelligence, and connected workflows into a single operating environment for what the company calls the agentic era. The stated goal is hybrid teams of humans and agents operating continuously across channels, with marketers freed to focus on strategy, creativity, oversight, and growth while agents handle execution-level work such as detecting performance shifts, diagnosing root causes, adjusting budgets, and notifying stakeholders without manual intervention. The launch positions Kenshoo Skai inside an industry-wide race to define what agent-native infrastructure means in marketing, alongside parallel moves from PubMatic, Yahoo DSP, LiveRamp, Amazon, and others throughout late 2025 and into 2026.

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