Liz 
Last week, someone on a panel described their AI workflow in a way I have not been able to shake. They set an agent in motion, then go work out. When they get back, they review what happened, kick off the next agent, and go take a shower.
I’m tired. A lot of my friends in ad ops are tired. We keep being asked to absorb the same preventable problems on behalf of organizations that have decided learning isn’t worth the time it takes.
For the past two years, publishers have largely talked about AI in abstract terms: opportunities, risks, legal concerns, SEO disruption, licensing deals, existential dread. Yes, they are all important. But they’re increasingly disconnected from the practical question every operations, revenue, and editorial team now faces: what are we actually doing with this stuff?
The future is ours to define. That’s my takeaway from last week’s Beeler.Tech events, Navigator NYC and AI Publisher Response. I don’t say that with a false sense of optimism. It’s all hard work from here on out. But it’s hard work that we’ll do together.
For years, publishers have been told to obsess over CPMs, viewability, and time-on-site. But according to Playwire’s new report, State of Publisher Ad Revenue 2026: Insights and Opportunities, many of the industry’s most commonly discussed metrics are not actually the strongest predictors of publisher revenue.
Possible is like the Mos Eisley Cantina, perhaps with slightly less scum and villainy. There, people talk about AI differently than they do on my planet, Beeler Prime. Like the Force, marketing is a foregone conclusion: it is everywhere.
AI can be useful in surfacing patterns, ranking information, speeding up repetitive steps, and supporting decision-making. But the people building and using them still need to understand how the system works: where the data comes from, how it moves, what gets logged, where the risks are, and where human judgment belongs.
Publishers know what it feels like to lose revenue without a clean explanation. A buyer avoids your site. A domain gets flagged. A piece of inventory gets treated like a risk. Sometimes the reason is obvious. A lot of the time, it’s buried inside someone else’s methodology, vendor score, block list, or browser standard.
That combination of a curiosity about adtech and a genuine respect for the role publishers play is what pulled me across the fence. That shift gave me a rare vantage point: I know what advertisers are thinking when they open a media kit or decide which partners make the plan.
I can remember back in the day when editorial and business teams operated as if they worked for separate companies. Publishers can’t afford such a divide anymore, and yet some sort of divide must remain. In a world of slop, trust is paramount. It is this trust that the editorial must create and the business must sell.