The Trade Desk has rolled out its most substantial update yet to Kokai, its flagship platform for planning, buying and measuring advertising across the open internet.
The update, called Kokai Zuma, began rolling out globally to Kokai clients on Thursday. It builds on the Kokai platform The Trade Desk launched in 2023, and marks a strategic pivot: the company says its heaviest recent investment has gone into the forecasting engine and AI infrastructure beneath the interface. That backend work — improved modelling of available inventory and predicted campaign outcomes — has already produced measurable results, the company says, with early tests of Zuma’s forecasting showing an average 32% improvement in cost-per-acquisition performance.
“Kokai changed the way digital media is bought and sold programmatically, and Zuma builds on that foundation, making our platform faster, simpler and smarter,” said Jeff Green, founder and CEO of The Trade Desk, in a statement announcing the release. Green said the update reflects direct feedback from customers navigating an increasingly fragmented digital media landscape, adding that the goal is a platform that removes friction from the work, puts agentic AI to practical use, and gives advertisers a clearer view of the outcomes their media dollars are driving.
At the centre of the release is Koa, the AI system The Trade Desk introduced in 2018 that now analyses more than 20 million ad impressions per second to inform campaign decisions. With Zuma, Koa takes on a more active, agentic role rather than simply surfacing recommendations. A new conversational Koa Assistant, backed by specialised Koa Agents, can help with campaign creation, audience building, troubleshooting and performance analysis. Automated audience discovery aims to surface previously untapped audiences to expand campaign reach, a feature aimed particularly at advertisers using Audience Unlimited, which draws on more than 70% of the global data providers in the company’s Data Marketplace. AI-driven frequency optimisation, meanwhile, adjusts how often ads are shown to a given audience based on campaign goals and performance, cutting down on manual tuning.
The release also reworks how advertisers measure and report on performance. Conversion Lift studies are easier to launch and now include new reporting dimensions for campaign planning. A redesigned reporting homepage surfaces frequently used reports, saved templates and generated reports in one place, while an upgraded Report Builder offers more flexibility to customise reports and explore the platform’s data.
Visually, Zuma refreshes how advertiser, campaign and ad group data are displayed, making key metrics and trends easier to spot at a glance. A new Applied Settings View consolidates targeting parameters into a single screen, and an upgraded bulk-editing tool lets users preview the effect of changes before committing to them. Still, The Trade Desk frames the interface as the most visible but not the most significant part of the update, calling the underlying forecasting and AI infrastructure the real foundation for everything users will encounter going forward.
The Trade Desk said Zuma’s rollout to Kokai clients will continue globally, with additional capabilities expected over time; some features described in the release are already generally available while others remain in open or closed beta. The Trade Desk, headquartered in Ventura, California, operates a self-service, cloud-based platform used by advertisers to create, manage and optimise digital campaigns, with offices across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
