Samba TV acquires Bestever AI to launch autonomous agentic advertising engine

The deal signals a pivot from AI-assisted automation to fully autonomous 'agentic' systems in the ad tech stack. By grounding Bestever's generative creative tools in its massive deterministic dataset, Samba aims to solve the 'hallucination' and irrelevance risks of generic AI models. This consolidation reflects a broader industry race to build end-to-end loops where AI independently manages planning, activation, and optimization. For the streaming ecosystem, this could drastically reduce the operational overhead of personalized, cross-platform campaigns. Watch for whether Samba’s agentic engine can demonstrably outperform human-led campaigns in real-time ROAS metrics by the end of 2026.

The acquisition follows Samba TV's May 2026 launch of 'Project Gravity,' an independent data activation platform designed specifically for the agentic era. Per MediaPost (May 2026), Project Gravity allows brands to match first-party data against Samba's identity graph to feed AI agents making thousands of decisions per second. This infrastructure push coincides with a broader industry move toward 'agentic' standards; in late 2025, a coalition of ad tech firms launched the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) to enable interoperable communication between buyer and seller AI agents (Samba TV, October 2025).

Industry momentum for autonomous buying has accelerated throughout 2026. Digiday reported in June 2026 that major players including WPP, Netflix, and Disney have begun establishing technical governance for agentic buying systems to ensure brand safety as human 'traders' are phased out of micro-decision workflows. This trend is a response to the massive fragmentation of the Total TV landscape, where Samba's own H1 2025 data showed CTV viewership growing 46% year-over-year while linear viewing remained nearly flat (TV Tech, August 2025).

Samba’s strategy hinges on its scale. Since 2024, the company has aggressively expanded its hardware footprint through embedding deals with manufacturers like Panasonic and Vestel, reaching over 100 million households globally (Business Model Canvas, March 2026). By securing 1.5 billion opted-in user profiles across these devices, Samba is positioning its deterministic data as the necessary 'fuel' for the autonomous agents now being deployed by holding groups and streaming giants alike.