Chalice AI, together with supply-side platform Index Exchange recently announced a strategic partnership with dentsu’s Next Gen initiative. Chalice will power a set of platform-independent AI bidding agents that offer clients customised models to underpin their campaigns.
New Digital Age spoke with Freddie Turner, Managing Director EMEA at Chalice AI (and regular NDA columnist) to find out more…
Is the industry discussion around AI outpacing client demand or is it client demand that is driving momentum?
In the early stages, the industry conversation definitely ran ahead – lots of businesses branded themselves as “AI-first” or claimed AI was already embedded in their offering. That created noise but not always meaningful outcomes. What’s shifted recently is that clients are no longer content with the rhetoric. They’re asking harder questions, pushing for proof, and looking for AI to deliver measurable business results rather than just being a buzzword. In that sense, client demand is now the real engine of momentum – it’s forcing the industry to move past talk and into tangible value.
Traditionally, platforms and vendors led the conversation around their capabilities. Now, advertisers are coming to us asking, ‘What actual business outcomes will this drive, and how will it improve my bottom line?’ That aligns perfectly with Chalice’s positioning: operational AI is where the real value lies.
What are the most common areas of support that marketers are asking for in relation to AI and their media investments?
There are three big areas.
The first is transparency: understanding how their data is used, what insights feed the algorithm, and why those algorithms make the decisions they do. The black-box model is no longer acceptable. Advertisers want to know how their models are being trained, why, and what impact that has on business strategy.
The second is around real business outcomes – not just impressions or click-through rates, but metrics like offline sales, brand lift, and customer lifetime value.
And finally, efficiency through automation. By stitching together disparate data sets that were once trapped in walled gardens, AI reduces fragmentation and delivers holistic performance. This kind of efficiency doesn’t just improve outcomes it also translates directly into cost savings
What new opportunities does Chalice AI’s recent alliance with dentsu and Index Exchange open up for advertisers?
The partnership between Dentsu, Index Exchange, and Chalice AI is industry leading — creating the most direct path yet between advertiser demand and publisher supply. Guided by Dentsu’s Algo Era vision, it’s about working with the best to drive innovation at scale and deliver client outcomes that shift the bottom line.
Index Exchange brings incredible sell-side technology and reach across publishers. By combining Dentsu’s innovation, Index’s supply-side scale, and Chalice’s decisioning technology, we can move optimisation much closer to the supply itself. Together, the three partners bring both scale and precision to every campaign.
In practice, that means greater transparency into what’s really driving media success, more efficient access to high-quality, brand-safe supply, and scalable environments for testing and innovation. To put it simply, it’s about getting closer to the signals from publishers so advertisers can understand and act on what’s truly moving the needle.
How does applying AI at the sell-side improve things for advertisers?
Think of it this way: in traditional demand-side activation, buying media has been a bit like buying a house because you like the area – it’s a nice postcode, but you don’t know much else. You probably wouldn’t buy a house that way.
What Chalice and Index enable is the ability to actually see inside: how many rooms it has, whether it gets good light, how big the garden is. That’s what access to rich, real-time publisher signals gives you. You can understand each impression in context and decide whether it’s worth buying.
Obviously, no human can make those decisions in real time. That’s where Chalice’s AI comes in, modelling all those signals, customising them to a client’s goals, and making the optimal buying decision at scale.
Where else might Chalice AI’s tech be applied in the future? What advertiser challenges remain to be solved?
Chalice is an AI layer that sits above media platforms. Anywhere there’s scale, complexity, or a need to better align context, quality, and outcomes, we have a potential role to play.
That includes CTV and video, where contextual and quality signals are critical; retail media, where product-level decisioning can dramatically improve performance; and privacy-first ecosystems, particularly in EMEA, where data sharing is restricted. Our modelling helps drive privacy-first approaches at scale.
There are still big challenges around bridging walled gardens, namely, creating seamless activation, measurement, and data sharing across the advertising landscape. There’s also deterministic identity resolution in signal-loss environments. AI performs best when it can learn from multiple data sets, and we’ve built Chalice to ingest from a range of platforms to deliver that seamlessly.
And finally, data privacy and control remains an issue. The future lies in bringing AI to the advertiser’s data, not the other way around. That avoids leakage, reduces cost, and keeps sensitive data secure. Privacy-first, AI-led advertising: that’s where the industry is heading.
