The Trade Desk Brings Koa AI Agents to Kokai Advertising Platform

The Trade Desk, one of the world's largest advertising technology companies, launched Kokai Zuma on August 27, 2026, the biggest update to its programmatic ad-buying platform since Kokai's debut in 2023. At the core of the update are AI agents called Koa, which take over part of the work previously handled manually by ad campaign specialists.

What Zuma Changes

Kokai is The Trade Desk's platform through which advertisers and media agencies buy ad space in real time across the internet, streaming TV, audio and other digital channels. Zuma is the platform's next major release, with the Koa agents at its center - specialized AI modules designed to replace the tedious, manual tasks previously performed by media planning teams.

The help and search agent answers user questions in natural language and suggests next steps within the interface. The campaign creation agent automates the setup of new ad campaigns. The analytics agent generates insights from campaign performance data, while the troubleshooting agent detects and flags errors in targeting or budget settings before they affect results.

Closed Testing Since August

The four Koa agents first entered closed testing on August 21, 2026, presented as an evolution of the Koa optimization engine that had been running in the background of the platform, now becoming a conversational AI assistant. A week later, The Trade Desk folded this feature into the broader Zuma update, which also included a redesigned reporting module, a consolidated targeting settings view, and improved bulk campaign editing tools.

The new package also includes an ad frequency optimization agent and expanded tools for measuring conversion lift. The company stresses that all the features are meant to reduce the number of manual tasks campaign teams must perform, while keeping full human control over final budget decisions.

The Numbers Behind the Launch

The Trade Desk says Zuma's updated forecasting models translate into an average 32 percent improvement in campaign performance measured by cost per acquisition. This is a key metric for marketing departments, as it shows how much a company pays for each customer acquired through a given ad campaign. The Koa engine itself is said to process more than 20 million ad impressions per second, while the agent responsible for audience creation draws on data from more than 70 percent of global ad data providers.

Kokai changed the way digital media is bought and sold programmatically, and Zuma builds on that foundation, making our platform faster, simpler and smarter - Jeff Green, founder and CEO of The Trade Desk

It's great to see The Trade Desk go all-in on agentic solutions, and the efficiency gains are real numbers - Karsten Weide, principal analyst at W Media Research

Advertising Enters the Agent Era

The launch of Kokai Zuma fits into a broader trend in digital advertising, where after a wave of chatbots, companies are starting to deploy AI agents capable of independently carrying out multi-step tasks rather than just answering questions. In this space, The Trade Desk competes with the likes of Google and Amazon, which are also developing AI tools to automate programmatic ad buying.

For Polish media houses and advertising agencies using programmatic platforms, this means that some of the routine tasks involved in setting up and optimizing campaigns will increasingly be taken over by AI agents. In practice, this could shorten the time needed to launch a campaign and reduce targeting errors, but it may also shift the skills expected of media specialists - from manually operating platforms toward overseeing the work of algorithms.

The Trade Desk has not yet given a timeline for the full rollout of all four Koa agents beyond closed testing, nor provided information on availability in the Polish market. The company says, however, that the Koa family of tools will gradually expand to cover more features of the Kokai platform in the coming months.