Ep 20. Who Actually Controls the AI Ad Stack? with Joe Root, Permutive

OpenAI just raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation — and apparently that only gives them 18 to 24 months of runway. They bought a live streaming network for over $100 million. They're building conversational ads with Smartly. Amazon is quietly opting every search advertiser into sponsored prompts inside Rufus. And Walmart is going the opposite direction entirely, building a native app inside ChatGPT.

This week, Shiv and Miles sit down with Joe Root, co-founder and CEO of Permutive, a data collaboration platform that sits at the intersection of media companies, agencies, and advertisers. Joe has a front-row seat to how AI is actually reshaping the ad stack — not in theory, but in the workflows his customers run every day.

Joe breaks down why AI is a tailwind for Permutive by dismantling the old agency margin model, why over half of his customers are now letting agents run tasks on their behalf — up from just 5% eighteen months ago — and why the real shift isn't replacing software, it's changing how humans interact with it.

They also get into why live content is the one thing AI can't replicate and what that means for publishers, why the native ad format for conversational AI is still completely unsolved, and why Amazon's sponsored prompts in Rufus might just be a repackaged version of a search arbitrage play that never really worked the first time around.

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