The Trade Desk debuts Kokai to overhaul programmatic ads with AI

Running digital ads without third-party cookies used to feel like flying blind. The Trade Desk thinks the cure isn't clinging to old trackers—it's giving the entire bidding engine an AI overhaul.

The independent ad tech giant just announced Kokai, a major upgrade to its programmatic platform. The release follows years of internal AI investments and comes roughly a year after the company made headlines in 2022 by cutting Google Open Bidding out of its DSP entirely.

Bidding at warp speed

The marquee stat behind Kokai is sheer horsepower: the platform now ingests and analyzes over 13 million advertising impressions every single second.

Instead of tracking people across the web with cookies or mobile device IDs, Kokai relies on a brand's own first-party data. Its algorithms forecast cross-channel performance and help marketers figure out where their next dollar should actually go.

The real fuel, though, is retail data. The Trade Desk has locked in partnerships with nearly 80% of the largest retailers in the United States, including Albertsons Media Collective and Walgreens Advertising Group. When advertisers turn on audience data, they can tap directly into those real-world purchase signals.

To help marketers justify top-of-funnel budgets, Kokai also introduces a slate of new metrics. The Quality Reach Index helps quantify upper-funnel targeting, while tools like the Retail Sales Index and TV Quality Index measure campaign efficiency across screens.

A periodic table for programmatic

There is also a complete front-end redesign on the way. The Trade Desk plans to roll out an interface dubbed the Programmatic Table—styled after the periodic table of elements—to make media workflows feel less like an intimidating spreadsheet nightmare.

Alongside the UI, a new partner portal will let retailers, TV networks, publishers, and data vendors integrate their capabilities directly with ad buyers. The Trade Desk says Kokai and its AI components are currently in alpha and beta testing, with plans to expand aggressively over the next 12 months to chip away at Big Tech's walled gardens.

Why it matters

For media buyers and brand marketers, Kokai addresses the real migraine of modern advertising: proving that brand-building and streaming ads actually drive revenue. Having instant access to retail benchmarks and quality reach metrics turns squishy top-of-funnel spending into something defensible in front of a CFO.

For the broader ad tech ecosystem, this is open-web muscle flexing against Google and Meta. By tying together nearly four-fifths of major US retail data, The Trade Desk is creating a genuine counterweight to Big Tech walled gardens. It proves you don't need Google's proprietary plumbing to run precision campaigns at scale.

We think betting heavily on retailer data is the smartest move independent ad tech has made in years. The catch, however, is that Kokai relies heavily on clean brand data. If an advertiser hasn't sorted out its own first-party database yet, even 13 million impressions a second won't save the campaign.