DMBS Spring 2026 Highlights AI Challenges and the GEO Vendor Boom for Agencies
I left the Digiday Media Buying Summit Spring 2026 with one clear takeaway: agencies are no longer treating AI as a future trend. They’re dealing with it now across leadership, planning, creative, search, and client strategy. The enthusiasm is real, but so is the uncertainty.
Held March 2–4 at Virgin Hotels Nashville, the invite-only summit brought agency executives together for candid Town Hall conversations under Chatham House rules. That setup made a difference. It gave people room to speak honestly about what’s happening inside agencies as AI adoption speeds up and a new wave of GEO vendors crowds the market.
AI Is Everywhere, but Agencies Are Still Figuring Out the Basics
The biggest theme at the summit was that AI has moved from experimentation to day-to-day operations. It’s no longer tucked away in an innovation team. It’s showing up in media planning, campaign execution, reporting, search visibility, content workflows, and client conversations.
That doesn’t mean agencies have it figured out.
One of the most memorable lines came from Lavall Chichester, SVP of SEO and AI Optimization at BarkleyOKRP/MissionOne Media, who said, “AI is like fire — it could be used to cook food or it could be used to burn your house down.” That captured the mood of the event well. AI is powerful, useful, and increasingly unavoidable, but it can also create serious problems when teams rush implementation without understanding the tools.
That tension is showing up from the top down. Leadership wants speed, scale, and efficiency. Practitioners want practical tools, clean workflows, and guardrails. When those priorities don’t align, friction builds quickly.
The Leadership Gap Is Becoming a Real Operational Problem
What stood out most was that many agency teams are not wrestling with whether to use AI. They’re wrestling with how to use it responsibly and effectively.
Some summit participants described a disconnect between executive enthusiasm and daily reality. Leaders are pushing AI initiatives, but in many cases frontline teams feel those decisions are being made without enough understanding of the inputs, risks, or limitations involved.
That gap creates real risk.
When leadership treats AI like a plug-and-play growth lever, agencies are more likely to make poor decisions around automation, creative quality, data use, and client expectations. It also puts pressure on teams to adopt tools they don’t trust or can’t properly evaluate.
One point came up repeatedly: agencies need education as much as they need technology. Internal workshops, test environments, cross-functional collaboration, and hands-on training are becoming essential, not optional.
Creative, Media, and Search Are Colliding Faster Than Expected
Another major thread from DMBS Spring 2026 was how AI is collapsing traditional boundaries inside agencies.
The old separation between paid media, organic search, content, and creative is getting harder to maintain. AI-powered search experiences are changing discovery. Media teams can’t ignore SEO implications. Search teams can’t work in isolation from content strategy. Creative teams are being asked to produce assets that work with automated media systems and AI-driven optimization.
The walls are coming down.
That shift is forcing agencies to rethink how they operate. It’s no longer enough to have isolated specialists optimizing within a single channel. The agencies that adapt fastest will be the ones that build integrated workflows around audience behavior, search visibility, and performance outcomes.
It also changes what agencies should expect from talent. Junior staff need more than technical onboarding; they need training in AI ethics, source evaluation, prompt literacy, and critical thinking. Senior teams need to stop assuming automation replaces strategy. It doesn’t. It raises the bar for strategy.
GEO Vendors Are Booming, but So Is Skepticism
If AI was the summit’s biggest challenge, GEO was its fastest-growing opportunity and its most crowded category.
Generative Engine Optimization is quickly becoming a central agency conversation as platforms like Google AI Overviews and Perplexity reshape how people discover brands and publishers. Instead of sending users through a traditional list of blue links, AI search surfaces summarized answers and cites a smaller set of sources. That puts real pressure on brands to be included in those responses.
Naturally, a wave of GEO vendors has rushed in to meet demand.
Some of that innovation is legitimate. Agencies and brands want tools that can monitor AI visibility, identify citation patterns, and improve discoverability across generative search environments. There are already examples of measurable gains, including visibility lifts tied to specialized AI search tools.
But the summit also surfaced growing skepticism: not every GEO solution is built on substance.
A lot of what’s being sold under the GEO label still overlaps heavily with traditional SEO. Some experts estimate that overlap at roughly 80%. Agencies need to be careful not to mistake rebranded SEO tactics, or worse, low-quality automation, for real strategic value.
The risk is obvious. In a gold-rush market, snake oil spreads fast. Cheap AI content packages, low-effort optimization claims, and risky “prompt injection” tactics may sound appealing, but they can just as easily lead to traffic losses, weak brand visibility, or even search penalties.
AI Search Is Reshaping Performance Strategy
What makes this more urgent is changing consumer behavior.
Recent industry data suggests a growing share of consumers now use AI tools for research before making purchase decisions. That matters because it changes where influence happens. If users are discovering products, brands, and reviews inside AI interfaces, visibility in those environments becomes a performance issue, not just a branding one.
That’s a meaningful shift for agencies.
Performance marketing used to revolve around platforms, placements, and attribution windows. Now it also has to account for whether a brand is showing up in AI-generated recommendations, summaries, and answer engines. Search strategy, content quality, and authority signals are now tightly connected to media outcomes.
For agencies, the implication is straightforward: AI visibility can’t sit at the edge of the marketing plan anymore. It has to be part of the core growth model.
What Agencies Need to Do Next
From my perspective, the message from DMBS Spring 2026 wasn’t “adopt more AI at any cost.” It was get smarter before you scale.
Agencies that handle this next phase well will likely do a few things better than the rest:
- train teams before over-automating workflows
- align leadership ambition with operational reality
- unify paid, organic, creative, and content strategy
- evaluate GEO vendors with the same rigor used for any performance partner
- focus on measurable business outcomes instead of AI buzzwords
The industry is clearly entering a new phase. AI is moving from novelty to infrastructure, and GEO is moving from a niche term to a mainstream agency discussion. But as the summit made clear, maturity still trails momentum.
The smartest agencies won’t just chase the newest tool. They’ll build systems, education, and measurement frameworks that keep strategy grounded while the market shifts around them.
FAQ
What was the main takeaway from DMBS Spring 2026?
Agencies are no longer debating whether AI matters. They’re actively trying to implement it across teams while managing risk, training gaps, and shifting client expectations.
Why are agencies skeptical of GEO vendors?
Because many GEO offerings look a lot like repackaged SEO. Agencies want real tools for AI visibility and citation tracking, but they’re wary of inflated claims and low-value automation.
How is AI changing agency operations?
AI is blurring the lines between media, search, content, and creative. That means agencies need more integrated workflows, clearer governance, and stronger cross-functional collaboration.
Why does AI visibility matter for performance marketing?
More consumers are using AI tools to research products and brands before making decisions. If a brand doesn’t appear in those AI-generated answers and recommendations, it can lose influence before a click ever happens.
Conclusion
What stood out after DMBS Spring 2026 was an agency landscape defined by urgency, experimentation, and healthy caution. AI is already reshaping how teams work, and the GEO vendor boom is creating both real opportunity and a lot of noise. For agencies trying to cut through that complexity and stay focused on performance, it helps to use tools built around measurable outcomes and smarter optimization. If you’re looking for a more disciplined way to connect AI-era visibility with return on ad spend, ROAS Suite is a strong place to start.