2026 AI Brunch: Co-existing with AI presented by Anoki

02-17-2026 10:00 AM - 02-17-2026 2:00 PM

The room was full, the connections were plentiful, and the conversations were valuable on and offstage. ThinkLA's AI Brunch: Coexisting with AI drew a cross-section of LA's advertising and marketing community to fill the room for a morning that moved from theory to practice, focusing on application and collaboration.

Abbey Thomas, Chief Commercial Officer at presenting sponsor Anoki, set the tone early. Her framing: AI's real value in advertising lies in its ability to surface intelligence that humans simply can't process at scale. It ran as a through-line for everything that followed.

The live demo was the morning's most talked-about moment. Jon Robert Bradford, Co-Founder and CEO of Colab, built an online brand in real time, from concept to website to sales, crowd-sourcing the brand identity from the audience as he went. The exercise illustrated, more viscerally than any slide deck could, how far AI-assisted work has come in a remarkably short time.

Moderated by Mack McConnell, co-founder of Geostar, the panel brought together sharp, practical voices from across media, analytics, creative, and marketing strategy. What stood out most was the emphasis on real execution: where AI is creating measurable leverage inside organizations today, how teams are applying it in practical ways, and where hesitation is beginning to create competitive gaps.

Hannah Davis Tsumoto, Head of Marketing AI Strategy at DoorDash, spoke to how one of the country's most data-rich consumer brands is threading AI through creativity, media, and measurement without losing the human signal that makes the work resonate. Michael Keller, EVP of Growth Analytics at Omnicom, brought the agency holding company perspective, specifically how AI is reshaping measurement infrastructure and what "high-performing" actually means when your analytics layer gets smarter. Sarah May Bates, SVP and Group Creative Director of AI and Innovation at RPA brought a grounded creative perspective to a conversation that can easily drift into abstraction. Bates made the case that the most effective AI applications aren't replacing creative judgment; they're compressing the distance between brief and breakthrough. Her take: the agencies winning right now are the ones treating AI as a collaborator, not a shortcut.

Yuksel Chelik, SVP of Growth at Choreograph/WPP Media, offered one of the morning's most quoted observations: "Tasks are getting automated, not jobs. But if your job is primarily made up of tasks that are easy to automate, you're at risk." Drawing on 15-plus years shaping data-driven media across two continents, her point landed with particular force: task-heavy, junior-level roles will feel the most disruption, and the advantage will go to professionals who evolve beyond execution into strategic thinking, systems design, and creative problem-solving.

Nicole Eisenberg, VP of Sales at event sponsor Nexxen, zeroed in on the rise of the agentic web and what it means for how consumers discover brands, arguing that diversification and data are now the connective tissue powering smarter advertising across every screen. Jonathan Moffie, Head of Agentic Product at Magnite, and Britany Scott, VP of Growth at Smartly Supply by AI Digital, rounded out the conversation with perspectives on agentic AI in streaming and programmatic and how DSP infrastructure is evolving to meet the moment.

Several consistent themes emerged across the morning: AI must be embedded into core operations, not treated as a side experiment; early adoption and rapid iteration create compounding advantage; and optimization is ultimately about leverage, doing more with less while maintaining quality.

The consensus, if there was one: the human-AI divide is a false choice. The practitioners in the room aren't debating coexistence anymore; they're executing it. AI won't replace ambitious builders; it will amplify them. The more useful question, raised more than once throughout the morning, is how fast your organization can turn AI capability into an operational edge.

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