The conversations at POSSIBLE in Miami made one thing clear: moving into 2026, the 'throw more bodies at the problem' era of agency growth is over. For years, scaling was a simple volume equation. You signed a big client, so you hired another manager. But campaigns are too complex now for that linear math to continue working at scale.
Our team attended the conference to discuss advertising automation efficiency at scale and some of the other biggest topics in digital advertising. During a standout session, Eric Mayhew, Fluency’s CPO and President, joined Taren King from Intuit SMB Media Labs to discuss this outdated AdOps model. One of their core topics was that agencies that fail to decouple revenue growth from headcount growth risk burning out before they can scale.
Together they shared how the Intuit SMB Media Labs team used a Digital Advertising Operating System to connect and activate their data and automate advertising execution. The result eliminated manual handoffs, lowered the risk of human errors, and dramatically improved speed for campaign launches.
Here is the operational blueprint they laid out during their conversation on building a scalable, AI-automated AdOps future.
1. If you want to scale, you must automate
The complexities of digital advertising make achieving optimal ad performance at scale impossible. AdOps teams have a lot of tasks to orchestrate, particularly if they’re running multichannel strategies or responsible for multi-location ad campaigns. Amplify this workload by 50, 70, or over 100 accounts, and it’s easy to see why burnout is such a problem.
“I've yet to meet a team that doesn't feel overwhelmed, overworked, and stressed. It just is the reality, right?” said Taren during the POSSIBLE conversation. “But your time is really valuable. If you spend it doing these mundane, monotonous tasks, you're not setting yourself up for success. You're crushing yourself into a spot where you add risk to the business and mistakes happen.”
Consider these stats, compiled in Fluency's 2025 Advertising Benchmark Report from advertisers in every vertical:
- On average, agencies need 76 hours to launch new accounts
- 25% of agencies need more than a week to launch a new campaign
- 80% of ad strategists manage three or more platforms manually
Automating low-value tasks, as Taren and his team have done, “allows your team to work on things that really drive the business forward in a big way,” according to Taren.
“Nine times out of 10, you can automate a process,” said Taren. “You may think your situation is too unique to automate, but that’s not often the case. These days, we can automate so much, including a lot of AI capabilities.”
Taren has seen automation help his team both scale their efforts and handle more nuanced, customized strategies for clients.
“With automation, we can handle more complex campaign setups,” said Taren. “Automation gives us both the scalability and campaign complexity we need to deliver relevant ad experiences. Before, we couldn’t tackle it because there would be a thousand ads running at the same time with dynamic copy. Now we do it with automation.”
Put it to work: look for your “time vampires”
It’s easier than you may think to figure out what parts of your workflow can benefit from enterprise advertising automation platforms. Taren and Eric both suggest looking for “time vampires” that “suck up all the time.” Eric always listens for the phrase, “Why can’t we just?” within an organization to determine which manual workflows have the biggest potential for operational simplification via automation.
“If you look at some of the tasks for your AdOps team, a lot of them are very time-consuming,” said Taren. “The impact-to-time ratio is not what you want for time-intensive things like launches or optimizations.”
In most cases, these time-consuming tasks are the ones that can be automated via AI-powered advertising optimization so your team can scale their high-value work and grow your organization’s impact.
2. Tech-enable your teams to free them for high-value strategic work
Giving your team technology to help them with their job gives them more time to do the work that they do better than any technology. They can take on tasks, projects, or initiatives they don’t have time to do when they’re just trying to keep the lights on.
Yes, automating repetitive tasks helps you get more done, but it also means you can focus on more strategic efforts. For example, instead of handling campaign setup, your AdOps team can focus on QA and optimizations—a much more strategic role and use of their time.
“I view automation as something that allows you to scale your business and amplify your team so that they can work on the things that are more important for the business,” said Taren. “Setting up a campaign can take hours and hours. If you can do that very quickly, you have more time to do all the other things like strategy workshops or hopping on calls with the clients.”
Put it to work: automate the most repetitive parts of your workflow
“Focus on things that don't provide substantial value for the business,” said Taren. “Using automation to manage those tasks is the right way to think about handling these things.”
If you can identify 80% of your launch and management tasks that are repetitive, they can be automated with tools like Fluency’s Blueprints. That means your teams only need to focus on the 20% of tasks that require a human touch—a drastic reduction in workload, effort, and time.
That also means they have 80% more time to do work that excites them, involves more strategic thinking, or utilizes more creativity. Using technology in this way means you can blend your team’s human expertise with automation’s workhorse replication efficiency and AI’s creative and analytical power.
“There is a reason that your clients come to you: you deliver a unique value to them,” said Eric. “You have an expertise, a valuable data set, or a specific campaigning strategy. With the right technology, you can show your clients, ‘This is our strategy. This is our philosophy. This is how we measure and can show you that it works.’ Once you have that, automation can work extremely well for scalability and growth.”
3. Work from one data “source of truth” for exponential efficiency
If you want to address your advertising operations challenges wholly and completely, you need a Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS) that can:
- Connect and sync data from multiple sources, including your primary data sets (e.g. CRMs, inventory data, and event data) and publisher platforms
- Automate dynamic campaign execution across major channels, including search, display, and programmatic
- Notify teams of real-time errors, events, and AI-powered optimization insights
- Make it easier to manage brand guidelines, compliance requirements, and AI governance
- Integrate AI and automation into your AdOps workflows for maximum efficiency
Taren knew that a DAOS could help his team overcome pivotal bottlenecks in their launch processes. Intuit SMB Media Labs is a financial media network that allows small- and medium-sized businesses to reach local audiences. With so much data to work with, Taren and his team needed a better way to refine and activate their data at scale.
“Our challenge was always, ‘How do we do this effectively while growing the business?’” said Taren. “We knew data was key but we couldn’t make the workflows more efficient in-house.”
Taren and his team use an order management system (OMS) to track spend, invoices, and other key client information. For Taren’s team, the OMS is “the source of truth. We input all our information into that single area.”
Getting customers synced from the CRM and OMS relied heavily on manual workflows. Even with a highly detailed launch playbook, Taren and his team sometimes needed to manually update the data three or four times before launching.
“Manual entry is time-consuming and creates potential points of failure in the system,” said Taren. “When you have to manually enter a budget 10 times, the chances of adding a zero by accident (or not adding a zero) are high.”
The Intuit SMB Media Labs team wanted to “have one point-of-entry be the source of truth, then push out all that information to our other systems,” according to Taren. With the right advertising automation technology, they were confident they could execute their strategies better and drive growth for their program. The key was finding a solution that could:
- Activate a complex media plan
- Automate processes from their CRM through to the OMS
- Convert media plans into turnkey strategies that are executable at a hyperlocal level
Taren and his team brought in Fluency’s DAOS to seamlessly integrate their CRM and OMS, reducing manual input touchpoints by 60% for every launch.
“Through Fluency, we can push our OMS data directly into the sources,” said Taren. “Before, we were doing this in all these different areas. With Fluency, it’s now all in one area. We can QA everything in one spot, not five different spots. This has allowed us to scale and move our business forward.”
Using an Operating System for end-to-end data management also drastically reduced risk for Taren’s team (and the wider business). Their entire launch workflow has fewer manual touchpoints and greater oversight managed by automated workflows.
Put it to work: identify your data gaps
If you want to scale your AdOps workflows, start by identifying all the data sources your team relies on to build, launch, manage, and optimize successful multichannel campaigns. Understanding how these data sets talk to each other (and more importantly, where they don’t) can help you figure out your biggest opportunities for time-saving efficiencies.
One reason Taren and his team have found such rapid success with Fluency is that they established a data source of truth—their OMS—early in the process. This makes it easier for them to use automated workflows and AI to activate their launch playbooks across multiple channels simultaneously.
4. AI can be your context-specific, autonomous teammate
AI already does so much for advertisers, but it’s evolving quickly. We’re already seeing AI agents (sometimes called agentic AI) execute tasks autonomously, quickly, and accurately.
Let’s be clear: AI agents aren't here to replace the human workforce. Instead, AI agents can supplement and scale your teams by taking over the execution of pivotal, repetitive tasks that bog down human AdOps teams.
This begs the question: what are the best enterprise advertising operations automation platforms with AI optimization and governance?
“When we started building AI here at Fluency, we wanted to safely employ AI to augment the pieces that we don't want to do anymore so we can become more complete strategists,” said Eric.
One way to do this is by passing off operational busywork to AI so you can more easily scale your human teams’ capabilities. Hiring a “digital workforce” of AI agents for your AdOps team members means they can delegate the most boring, challenging, or monotonous tasks to technology.
“AI and automation allow you to protect valuable work and offload the execution,” said Taren. “You can protect the work that you love, that you're passionate about, and that benefits from having that human touch value.”
AI can serve the role of a supportive teammate in your job, making it possible to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. Eric argues that we all “find ways to scale ourselves by ignoring certain parts of our job so we can do what’s more valuable,” even if we aren’t currently using technology to help complete tasks.
Working alongside AI and using it to execute nuanced, context-specific tasks gives your team more time, energy, and capacity to do the creative or relationship-building work that makes the most of their unique skill sets.
“As an industry, we’re going to continue giving AI more and more agency,” said Eric. “That means AI will be able to act with authority and autonomy. Eventually, you will be able to delegate work to AI that, quite frankly, you can’t do as well. AI will become your counterpart to help you get through the process.”
Put it to work: figure out where AI adds the greatest value to your human teams
As you consider what technology solutions to adopt for your ad operations, look for tech that helps you re-focus your team’s “human expertise” to more high-value activities.
For example, AI can do a lot, but it will never replace human relationships, strategic thinking, or innovative problem-solving. Pairing AI with automation can free up your team to focus on these critical areas and drive growth for your company.
“We will eventually use AI as a coworker and it will be really helpful,” said Eric. “We will be able to do more with less. AI is just another tool that can help us do our jobs.”
5. Codify safety with configuration-based governance
As advertising operations become more automated, one question is simple but urgent: what happens if the machine makes a mistake?
“We're seeing a lot of concerns about compliance, a lot of concerns about brand safety... Who's on the hook if AI does the wrong thing?” Eric said.
The reality is that, for enterprise organizations, governance is the foundation that makes AI and automation truly safe for deployment. The solution lies in a concept Eric introduced as configuration-based AI governance. Rather than relying on engineers to hard-code safety rules, modern platforms must allow marketing teams to set guardrails themselves.
“We have the ability to configure governance, which means that you can configure it into your native language,” he explained. This allows teams to specifically “look for key phrases and discuss terms that are invalid” to ensure every ad is either “compliant or unsafe” before it launches, according to Eric.
This approach uses a technical framework called retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to ensure the AI isn't just hallucinating and is, in fact, grounded in your specific data. As Eric noted, this process makes automation “completely automatic and safe” because the system can verify exactly where the data came from, communicating it with a “single button click.”
Put it to work: Shift governance from reactive to proactive
Use enterprise AI advertising platforms, like Fluency’s DAOS, to configure universal rules in your native language (e.g., defining invalid terms and safety checks). This ensures that compliance is baked into every automated action before it ever goes live.
Next steps: positioning your AdOps team for success
The path to operational excellence and profitable growth means recognizing that technology is critical for amplifying your team’s capabilities. Automation, AI, and a DAOS each play a pivotal role in helping implement scalable tools for automated ad workflows in 2026 and beyond.
A DAOS can centralize, organize, and manage all of your advertising data from different platforms and sources for seamless integration and streamlined workflows. Bringing all these data sources together also makes it possible to utilize AI and automation at scale, maximizing efficiency. As the same time, sophisticated AI advertising governance will allow for safe, brand-aligned implementation.
However, without a solid foundation in place, even the most advanced technology will struggle to deliver results. Start by identifying the areas where your team currently spends the most time and resources. These are likely areas that could benefit from enterprise advertising automation tools. By implementing these solutions, you can free up your team's valuable time and energy to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Still not sure where to start? Our team is happy to help. Reach out to set up a one-on-one consultation with one of our Fluency AdOps experts and get personalized recommendations based on your biggest challenges or goals.
