Google's Ask Ad Manager: AI that cuts troubleshooting from hours to minutes

Google is folding its Gemini models into Google Ad Manager via a new tool called Ask Ad Manager, a conversational agent that lets ad-ops teams ask why a line item is not delivering and get suggested causes drawn from the platform's own data. "The idea is, can we go from hours to minutes to making sure you can recover that revenue," said Peentoo Patel, senior director of product management at Google, in a fireside chat with Mike Shields at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Patel also flagged AI that could create new inventory formats - overlays and in-scene banners placed in "open scenes" of video - rather than adding another commercial break, an idea pitched as especially valuable in CTV and livestreaming, where Google's Dynamic Ad Insertion already handled 11 million concurrent devices during the Cricket World Cup.

The crux

Google is automating the diagnostic and inventory-expansion layer of ad operations, selling publishers on recovered revenue and new formats while deepening their dependence on the very stack the courts just ordered opened up.

Sell-side read

The efficiency is real and publishers will take it, but AI-driven inventory and troubleshooting inside GAM is another reason not to migrate off it - publishers should treat these tools as conveniences, not as a reason to defer the data-portability rights they just won.

Watch

Whether Google opens Ask Ad Manager and its specialized agents to third-party and first-party agents at scale, or keeps the highest-value diagnostics walled inside its own stack.