The Age of Agentic Marketing Is Here: Inside Skai’s ShopAble 2026 Announcements

For 20 years, Skai has helped shape how marketers plan, buy, measure, and optimize media. ShopAble 2026 marks the start of our next chapter: a fundamental reimagining of how work gets done across channels.

Media execution is entering its fourth era. Point solutions gave way to omnichannel platforms. Omnichannel gave way to GenAI-assisted workflows. Now, in 2026, the shift is to something bigger: agentic. Humans set goals. Systems act. Specialist agents execute marketing workflows continuously, inside the guardrails their teams define.

The urgency is double-sided. Marketers aren’t the only ones changing. Consumers are increasingly turning to AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Sparky to decide what to buy, where to buy it, and which brands to trust. The influence moment is moving earlier, and it’s happening inside AI systems. Marketers who understand that will be well positioned. Those still optimizing to the last click, less so.

Here is what we announced, and why it matters.

Skai Studio: The agent-native operating system for marketing

The centerpiece of this year’s announcements is Skai Studio, a new agent-native environment where teams build and orchestrate an AI marketing workforce that turns strategy into campaigns, content, experiments, and insights.

Inside Skai Studio, teams deploy specialized agents that execute marketing workflows end-to-end, detecting performance shifts, diagnosing root causes, adjusting budgets, and keeping stakeholders in the loop, all without manual intervention.

The reason this matters: manual workflows can’t keep pace with the speed today’s marketing demands, and assistants can’t close the loop on their own. Skai Studio gives our clients a level of speed and quality neither approach can deliver, turning operational efficiency into real performance gains.

As Gil Sadeh, President of Skai, put it in his keynote at ShopAble 2026:

“It is safe to say that in the near future, your organization will look different, and so will every job inside it. We feel it already: more pressure, leaner teams, expectations climbing. The old demand to ‘do more with less’ is now compounded by a new one: Do much more with much less by using AI. But we need to think not in terms of doing more of the same things with AI, but a fundamentally new operating model. A new org design with a hybrid organization of people directing intelligent agents. Reporting, optimization, and analysis happening continuously, in the flow of work. Decisions get made and executed by agents, inside the guardrails you set.”

Agent-Ready Optimization: smarter budgets, less setup

Budget Navigator has long been one of our most powerful capabilities, and one of our most complex. With Agent-Ready Optimization, we are rebuilding the experience around an enhanced algorithm and a dramatically simpler setup.

The new approach combines budget and KPI targets into a single, simpler flow so teams no longer have to choose between them. But the bigger story is what this allows. We are building Agent-Ready Optimization as a backend capability that agents can act on across Skai workflows. As teams move toward more autonomous operating models, optimization becomes a tool agents call on continuously.

Measurement Hub: from reporting to real decisions

Measurement has been one of the hardest problems in media. Measurement Hub is our answer: a one-stop, easy-to-use measurement and attribution hub that brings causal incrementality into the same workflow as planning and optimization.

Measurement Hub launches with Incrementality Insights for Amazon, campaign-level causal impact analysis powered by Media Mix Modeling and Multi-Touch Attribution. The result is a clearer view of what is actually driving incremental results.

The interface is built around how marketers actually work. Teams can run scenario planning, watch performance trends, and use budget simulation to model the impact of shifting spend, surfacing the point of diminishing returns before a dollar moves. Insights connect directly into planning and optimization workflows, so analyzing performance and improving it happen in the same place.

Strategic Advisory Services: helping marketers support a hybrid workforce

Agentic transformation is organizational. Our recent survey of hundreds of clients found that only 4% of media teams have an agent-first operating model in place today. The opportunity is enormous, and so is the change-management challenge that comes with it.

To help leaders get oriented, we are launching the Agentic Readiness Framework, a diagnostic that shows where your organization stands today, where the gaps are, and what it takes to move forward. From there, our new Strategic Advisory Services team picks up: senior consultants delivering packaged, premium advisory in agentic transformation and commerce media.

The team will help clients with agentic transformation roadmaps, commerce-media strategy reviews, measurement program design, and organizational design for AI-native marketing teams. The goal is practical: help leaders assess where they are today, identify the high-impact use cases, and redesign workflows, operating models, and data foundations to support a hybrid workforce of people and agents.

Custom Agents in Celeste and Google AI Max

Since launching 12 months ago, Celeste has grown to more than 1,500 users across more than 200 organizations, generating tens of thousands of interactions every month. Custom Agents builds on that foundation, letting users deploy always-on Celeste analysts that monitor, analyze, and deliver insights on a schedule, automatically. Users can choose from pre-built expert templates or convert any prompt into an agent, set a schedule, and let Celeste do the rest.

Custom Agents are also the foundation of what comes next in Skai Studio, where teams will orchestrate an entire AI marketing workforce executing strategy end-to-end.

As AI reshapes discovery across the broader search ecosystem, Skai is also announcing full support for Google AI Max, helping marketers manage and optimize the next generation of AI-driven search experiences directly through Skai.

One platform, three ways to work

These announcements are connected by a single architectural idea. Our platform now meets marketers wherever they are on the agentic journey:

The architecture is open by design. The platform is built to be the foundation any agent runs on, whether that is a Skai agent, a client’s own, or a third-party tool. The advantage lives in what sits underneath: unified data, marketing expertise, and two decades of optimization and measurement tools, accessible to any agent through open standards like MCP.

All three sit on the same foundation: unified data, marketing expertise, executable skills, 20 years of optimization and measurement tools, and the controls and audit trail enterprise marketers need.

Welcome to the age of agentic marketing.

If you are a Skai client, contact your success team for more information on any of the announcements above. If you are not yet a Skai client and want to explore how these solutions can transform your commerce media program, schedule a demo.