The Trade Desk shipped Zuma on 27 August, its biggest update to the Kokai buying platform in the three years since Kokai’s 2023 launch. Where Kokai was a buying-interface overhaul, Zuma centers on agentic AI: a conversational assistant called Koa, an audience-creation agent that builds segments from a campaign prompt, and an ad-frequency optimization agent. Product marketing directors Jaime Nash and Samantha Ross introduced the release; most of it is live now, with some agentic features still in closed beta and Koa reaching general availability by year-end.
01Why this matters for publishers and buyers
| The pricing signal is the real story, not the AI | Audience Unlimited — unrestricted access to data providers covering more than 70% of TTD's data partners — now runs on a flat 4.4% impression fee instead of per-segment pricing. That's TTD betting buyers will spend more data once the marginal cost of trying a new segment drops to nothing. |
|---|---|
| Measurement got materially faster, which changes negotiating cadence | One-click Lucid brand-lift studies that used to take about a week, plus automated Nielsen IQ lift integration, mean buyers can validate a campaign's impact inside the same planning cycle instead of the next one — publishers should expect faster, more frequent performance conversations, not slower ones. |
| "Harder to leave" is the explicit design goal | Bulk changes across hundreds of ad groups, a single-view Applied Settings pane, and a Modeling feature that previews an edit's projected impact before it's applied all reduce the friction of staying inside Kokai rather than switching platforms — durable switching costs, not just new features. |
| Agentic workflow tools are becoming buy-side table stakes | Koa's conversational prompting and prompt-based audience creation put TTD in the same agentic-tooling race as Google's Ask Ad Manager and the IAB Tech Lab's AAMP work — publishers running GAM/AdX in parallel with Kokai demand should expect buy-side agents to query inventory and pricing more directly over time. |
Zuma's individual features — audience agents, faster brand lift, bulk editing — read as incremental.
02What publishers should do
03The bottom line
Zuma’s individual features — audience agents, faster brand lift, bulk editing — read as incremental. The strategic move is the pricing shift on Audience Unlimited and the explicit “harder to leave” framing: The Trade Desk is using agentic AI to raise switching costs for buyers at the exact moment agentic tools are starting to touch the sell side too. Publishers monetizing through Kokai demand should read Zuma as a preview of how fast buy-side tooling is about to move, not just a UI refresh.