Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) disclosed at Cannes Lions on Thursday 18 June that it is rebuilding its entire US advertising technology on Amazon Web Services (AWS) around autonomous AI agents.1 The platform runs on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a named Amazon product for deploying AI agents in production. The agents handle media planning, demand forecasting, real-time campaign optimisation and closed-loop measurement, which tracks an advert from purchase through to a verified outcome.
WBD sells advertising space, the sell-side of the market, and it is now handing the buying and optimisation of that inventory to software rather than to a desk of human traders. The rebuild industrialises the four agentic ad products WBD showed at its final standalone upfront on 13 May, the annual sale where US television networks pre-sell their ad inventory to buyers. Kerv.ai's scene-level targeting, one of those four, matches adverts to on-screen content. Unified media planning ships in the third quarter of 2026; composable order management, pricing and stewardship follow in the fourth.
Three details separate this from a festival keynote slide: the named AWS services, Dr Nage Sethu, WBD's senior vice-president for technology, attached to the build, and a two-quarter schedule with real dates. A caveat rides with every Cannes disclosure, because a named rollout is not a shipped system and a third-quarter date is a target rather than a live product. Whatever WBD builds now becomes infrastructure for a larger owner, since the US Department of Justice cleared the Paramount Skydance takeover of WBD on antitrust grounds on 12 June, ad stack included.
