How InMobi Is Reinventing Advertising with AI Agents

**Ari Paparo** (0:10)
Welcome to Marketecture, where you can get smart fast with in-depth interviews of leading technology executives. I'm Ari Paparo. I'm joined today by Abhay Singhal, the co-founder of InMobi and the CEO of InMobi Advertising. Thanks for being here.

**Abhay Singhal** (0:22)
Nice to be here, Ari. How are you doing?

**Ari Paparo** (0:24)
I'm a little warm. I should have said we're at the UTA beach at Cannes, and the air conditioning has been working hard, doing its duty, but by two in the afternoon, it maybe needs a little restart.

**Abhay Singhal** (0:37)
Oh, we need all a little bit of cooling. In this hot ad tech world.

**Ari Paparo** (0:41)
Wait, aren't you based in India?

**Abhay Singhal** (0:44)
I am, but I also spent enough time in San Francisco to know what the difference is.

**Ari Paparo** (0:49)
Okay, right. If someone from India says the air condition is not good enough, I'm like, that's a different level.

**Abhay Singhal** (0:55)
Let's just say I'm spoiled.

**Ari Paparo** (0:56)
Okay.

**Abhay Singhal** (0:57)
He's a global citizen that I am.

**Ari Paparo** (0:59)
But we're doing our best to bring you the ad tech news you want. So thanks for joining me. So I guess last time you talked about Marketecture, possible and you were launching your agentic solution. So tell us about that. What's been going on in the three or four months since and what you're seeing.

**Abhay Singhal** (1:15)
Well, it's been an amazing launch so far. We're squarely in the middle of agentic advertising and agentic commerce both.
As you know, InMobi as a brand, consumer brand called as Glance, which is taking a leading position on defining inspiration shopping through the agentic infrastructure. We've also taken a very lead position on coming up with new ad formats that are very AI enabled and trying to use the existing rails of RDB to bring in the entire agentic advertising. So couldn't be more excited to be talking about these things.

**Ari Paparo** (1:50)
Yeah. So tell me a little bit more about it. So I don't know if you just launch or are going to launch a agentic selling platform. So tell me about what that is.

**Abhay Singhal** (2:00)
Yeah. So agentic selling platform is a platform where the buyers can directly integrate with InMobi Exchange and they can bring their own algorithms, they can bring in their own infrastructure to be able to make decisions on what to buy and what not to buy. As you know, the whole SaaS industry is going through a massive, massive shift.

**Ari Paparo** (2:18)
Yeah.

**Abhay Singhal** (2:18)
The traditional big softwares are no longer needed where somebody can just do a conversation and it can do the work for you. So as agencies and brands are looking to changing their own infrastructure, we ourselves have evolved on completely on the AdCP protocol to allow us to be accessed through whatever the infrastructure that the advertiser chooses to have.

**Ari Paparo** (2:40)
Right.

**Abhay Singhal** (2:41)
But what's also very important is the viewpoint that we are taking on the agentic advertising and maybe that's what you want to talk next.

**Ari Paparo** (2:49)
Sure.

**Abhay Singhal** (2:50)
So interesting part on the agentic advertising that I look at in the world is how the advertising is actually going to move more down the funnel.

**Ari Paparo** (3:01)
Okay.

**Abhay Singhal** (3:01)
With agents doing the conversation with the agents, I actually feel that the whole component of advertising that used to come in during the process of research is going to get eliminated. What does that mean? Is that means that the advertisers have to be really careful about presenting themselves in a way which is much closer to the transaction than to the conversation stage.
And that is a viewpoint that we are taking on the advertising which is sort of prompting us to launch a bunch of different ad formats in the advertising space.

**Ari Paparo** (3:33)
So like in the old way of doing things, you did a media plan and a research plan and then that determined what you wanted to buy and you can use AI to do that still and probably everyone is. But I think what you're saying is that if your AI is really just telling the live system whether you want impressions or not, then you're on a tighter line and you have to be more accurate and precise about what you want.

**Abhay Singhal** (3:57)
Yeah, and my view is that you're still not using AI to the fullest if you are saying that, look, I need to tell the AI what to do. Right. How about we imagine a world where we tell AI what we are looking to achieve.