Shobha Diwakar

When Your Customer Is an AI: Building Ad Platforms for the Age of Autonomous Marketing

As AI agents increasingly create campaigns, generate creative assets, allocate budgets, optimize performance, and analyze results, advertising platforms are undergoing a fundamental shift. The primary user is no longer just the marketer. Increasingly, it is the AI acting on their behalf. Drawing on her experience leading Ads Platform at Snap, Shobha Diwakar explores how product teams can design platforms that effectively serve both human and AI users while maintaining trust, transparency, and control. In this session, Shobha will explore: - Designing advertising platforms for AI-driven decision making, including how campaign creation, targeting, bidding, optimization, and measurement evolve when AI becomes a primary user of the system. - Defining the boundaries between human judgment and AI autonomy, balancing automation with the oversight, control, and accountability marketers expect. - Building trust in AI-powered products, using transparency, explainability, and feedback mechanisms that increase adoption while maintaining confidence in automated outcomes. Through practical examples and lessons from building advertising technology at scale, this session will provide product, design, and engineering leaders with a framework for creating products where AI is increasingly both the user and the decision-maker.