Meet the all-new Koa: Your conversational AI assistant

Koa’s conversational experience is currently in closed beta. Not all capabilities described here are available today, and The Trade Desk intends to continue rolling out enhancements over time. References to upcoming capabilities are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to change. 

For years, Koa has been the AI engine powering The Trade Desk behind the scenes — optimizing bids, pacing budgets, and finding performance across tens of millions of impressions every second. Koa is now evolving into something more: a conversational AI assistant that brings that same intelligence directly to you within the platform. 

Marketing teams are being asked to run more efficiently, prove performance faster, and manage growing complexity — often with the same head count. Koa is a tool designed to help you work through challenges and act faster, while keeping decisions in your hands. 

Whether you’re creating a campaign, investigating a pacing issue, or trying to better understand what’s driving performance, Koa can help you uncover insights and take action more quickly. That means spending less time on routine work and more time focused on making an impact.

Get to know the all-new Koa 

• Why Koa matters now

• What are Koa Agents?

• What you can do with Koa

• How Koa keeps you in control

• Getting started

• Extending Koa beyond the platform 

Why Koa matters now 

Marketing teams are under increasing pressure to connect every media investment to real business outcomes. Yet much of the day-to-day still involves manual workflows, pulling reports, and piecing together insights across screens and dashboards. 

Opportunities can surface faster than teams can act on them, and strategic work often gets crowded out by operational tasks. When every decision counts, the time spent hunting for an answer is not spent acting on it. 

Koa is designed to close that gap. 

Rather than searching manually, you can simply ask Koa and move from insight to action quickly. It is designed to surface the answer, explain the reasoning behind it, and suggest next steps in a matter of seconds — all without leaving your workflow. 

That shift frees up time for the work where marketers can have the greatest impact: 

• Strengthening strategy 

• Identifying new opportunities 

• Responding to campaign signals faster 

• Making more informed decisions 

• Connecting media investment to business goals

What are Koa Agents? 

Koa’s conversational experience is currently in closed beta and will live directly within our platform as an AI assistant you can turn to anytime. Behind the scenes, Koa serves as an entry point to a growing set of specialized agents, each designed to support a different part of the media buying process. 

Rather than navigating separate tools and workflows, you can simply describe what you’re trying to accomplish. Koa then draws on the appropriate agent — or combination of agents — to help surface answers, solve problems, and take action more efficiently. 

The examples below highlight the different Koa Agents and how they can help advertisers get work done across the platform. While Koa will continue to evolve over time, they reflect the growing range of experiences Koa is designed to support. 

What you can do with Koa 

1. Help and search: Get answers without hunting for them 

Koa can answer questions about your campaigns, platform setup, and offer best practices without you needing to dig through the platform. Example prompts include: 

• Which campaigns are under-pacing this week? 

• What are the best practices for setting base bid and max bid? 

• How do I set up conversion tracking? 

Koa offers the answer, explains the reasoning behind it, and points you to the next step. 

2. Campaign creation: Launch campaigns faster  

Upload a media plan in the format you already use and Koa can help build your full campaign structure — asking clarifying questions, flagging errors and inconsistencies, and ensuring nothing moves forward without your review or approval. 

Work that once took hours of manual setup can become a ready-to-launch campaign in an instant, giving teams more time to focus on strategy and optimization. Example prompts include: 

• Build me a campaign based on this media plan [spreadsheet attached].  

• Review this media plan and flag any potential issues. 

3. Audience building (coming soon): Build relevant audiences more quickly 

Describe the audience you want to reach, and Koa can translate that description into a more precise, signal-rich audience using third-party segments including commerce data. 

Instead of manually configuring targeting parameters and sifting through thousands of audience segments, you can simply describe your ideal audience in natural language. Koa identifies relevant signals, builds the audience for you, and shows you its logic, so you can refine the approach if needed and move forward with confidence. Example prompts include: 

• I want to reach new parents who are actively researching family-friendly vehicles.  

• Build me luxury travelers who are likely to book an international trip in the next six months. 

• Help me reach small-business owners looking for accounting or payroll software. 

4. Insights: Understand what is driving performance 

Instead of digging through reports and dashboards, you can explore campaign performance conversationally — uncovering trends, opportunities, and the signals behind what’s driving outcomes. Example prompts include: 

• Which creatives are driving the most conversions for this campaign? 

• Which publishers are over- or underdelivering? 

• What were the biggest performance changes for this campaign week over week? 

5. Troubleshooting: Diagnose and resolve issues before they impact performance 

When a campaign needs attention, Koa can help identify potential issues, explain what’s driving them, and recommend the next steps. Today, you decide which fixes to apply; over time, Koa can help apply certain fixes directly with your direction. Issues that previously took hours to track down can be resolved in minutes. Example prompts include: 

• Which campaigns require my attention most urgently, and why? 

• Why isn’t this ad group spending, and how can I fix it? 

• What can I do to improve performance of this campaign? 

How Koa keeps you in control

Koa is designed to help you move faster without relinquishing control. It operates within your existing permissions and guardrails, using only the campaigns and data you have already set. You can review why it is making a recommendation, refine its approach, or override its suggestions entirely — and if you prefer to handle something manually, those controls remain available whenever you need them. 

Transparency and control matter as AI takes on more of the operational work. Koa shows the reasoning behind its recommendations, not just the recommendation itself, so you understand what it’s suggesting and why.

Getting started 

Koa’s conversational experience is currently in closed beta. 

To learn more, reach out to your representative at The Trade Desk or use the contact form below. For teams participating in the closed beta, no new integration is required — Koa appears as a side panel within the platform, available when needed and out of the way when not. 

This information is provided solely for background and is not a representation or guarantee of any future performance.
 

_Source: 

_{1. The Trade Desk Platform Data, Internal benchmarking, Q2 2026, comparing AI response time to manual information retrieval.}