The Trade Desk turns its Koa AI engine into a conversational assistant, in closed beta

August 16, 2026 · thetradedesk.com

The Trade Desk has moved Koa, the AI engine that has optimized bids and paced budgets across its platform for years, into a conversational assistant now available in closed beta. Within the interface, Koa acts as an entry point to a set of specialized agents covering help and search, campaign creation, insights, and troubleshooting, with an audience-building agent described as coming soon. Advertisers can upload a media plan in their existing format and have Koa build the full campaign structure, flagging errors and inconsistencies before anything moves forward without review. The company says work that once took hours of manual setup can become a ready-to-launch campaign in an instant, and it plans to extend Koa into advertisers' broader technology stacks through the Open Agentic Kit, starting with a small group of partners.

Campaign teams stretched thin gain a single place to ask why a campaign is under-pacing or which creative is driving conversions, cutting the time spent pulling reports across dashboards. Approval still rests with the marketer: Koa shows its reasoning and operates inside a team's existing permissions, so recommendations wait for a human before they take effect. Teams running high volumes of campaigns stand to save the most time, since building a launch-ready structure from a media plan happens in minutes instead of hours. As Koa's audience-building agent and the Open Agentic Kit roll out, the same conversational layer could eventually reach targeting and tools outside The Trade Desk itself.