As automation becomes table stakes in programmatic advertising, Viant is making a sharper claim than most of its peers. The company says its newly launched product, Outcomes, can run digital ad campaigns autonomously across the open internet, optimizing toward business results with little day-to-day human involvement.
The launch comes at a moment when advertisers are grappling with channel sprawl, signal loss, and growing pressure to prove return on ad spend. Viant’s pitch is clear, remove operational complexity and let AI handle execution, without forcing marketers to sacrifice transparency.
Viant’s Outcomes product aims to take humans out of the loop
According to Viant, Outcomes is its first fully autonomous advertising product and is built on the company’s existing ViantAI platform. Rather than automating individual tasks like bidding or targeting, Outcomes is positioned as a new execution layer that manages campaign setup, optimization, and ongoing adjustments end to end.
At the center of the product is what Viant calls its AI Lattice Brain, a decisioning architecture designed to evaluate multiple proprietary signals at once. These include Viant’s Household ID, IRIS_ID data from its IRIS.TV acquisition, supply quality scoring, historical performance, bid pricing dynamics, and real-time delivery data. The system then makes and executes optimization decisions without manual intervention.
Advertisers using Outcomes define the business objective they want to achieve, such as customer acquisition, product sales, or return on ad spend. ViantAI handles how and where ads run across the open internet, while providing visibility into placements, channel mix, and performance.
Early use cases focus on lower-funnel outcomes
At launch, Outcomes is designed to optimize toward lower-funnel metrics, including cost per action and return on ad spend. Viant has said that support for mid- and upper-funnel objectives is in development, suggesting the company sees this as a broader platform shift rather than a point solution.
One early beta test highlighted by Viant involved home décor brand MacKenzie-Childs. In the test, Viant AI ran against a human trader managing a campaign inside a DSP. The human trader had access to retargeting capabilities that Viant’s system did not, yet Viant reports that Outcomes still delivered a 2.3x improvement on a cost-per-action basis.
For Viant, these results are meant to demonstrate that autonomous systems can move beyond simple rules-based automation and make holistic media decisions at scale.
Transparency as a differentiator against walled gardens
Viant is also positioning Outcomes as a counterpoint to the increasingly closed ecosystems of Google, Meta, and Amazon. While those platforms offer automated buying and optimization, they are often criticized for opaque decisioning and limited insight into where ads actually run.
Viant’s leadership has emphasized that Outcomes is designed to preserve transparency alongside autonomy. Marketers can see which channels are being used, how budgets are allocated, and what performance looks like across the open internet.
This framing reflects a broader tension in programmatic advertising. Many advertisers want more automation as complexity grows, but remain wary of black-box systems that limit control, measurement, or accountability.
What this suggests for marketers
Viant’s launch of Outcomes highlights several shifts that marketers may want to keep an eye on.
First, autonomous execution is moving from experimentation to productized reality. Tools like Outcomes suggest that AI is no longer just assisting traders but actively replacing large portions of manual campaign management, especially in performance-driven buying.
Second, differentiation in adtech may increasingly hinge on data quality and transparency rather than automation alone. Viant’s emphasis on proprietary identity data, supply quality scoring, and open-internet visibility points to how vendors are trying to stand apart from walled gardens.
Finally, the promise of autonomy raises organizational questions. If execution becomes largely automated, human teams may need to refocus on strategy, creative direction, and business alignment rather than optimization mechanics.
Why this launch matters now
The debut of Outcomes marks a significant milestone in Viant’s longer-term goal of building a fully autonomous DSP. More broadly, it reflects how AI-driven decisioning is reshaping expectations in programmatic advertising, especially as signal loss and media fragmentation continue to challenge traditional workflows.
For marketers, the key takeaway is not that humans are being removed entirely, but that the role of human oversight is changing. As autonomous products like Outcomes mature, the balance between trust, transparency, and performance will likely define which platforms gain long-term adoption.
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