RTL-owned sell-side ad tech business smartclip this morning announced ‘Sidekicks’, a new AI platform which will support operational teams working in advertising via a portfolio of specialist AI agents. The company says Sidekicks is designed to address concrete use cases, at a time when industry interest in the use of AI agents is growing. smartclip says the core technology could also be deployed outside of media and advertising, opening up an interesting potential new revenue stream for the ad tech business.
Sidekicks’ AI agents (which will themselves be called sidekicks) will assist with various tasks across digital advertising workflows, including campaign briefing, planning, delivery, monitoring, and reporting. The platform has been developed in close collaboration with smartclip’s measurement-focused subsidiary Realytics, and combines Realytics’ media intelligence with smartclip’s specialism in workflow automation.
The ad tech business emphasises that any proprietary data that the AI agents analyse will be kept within the organisation, and not used to inform a wider dataset which could be used by other companies.
Thomas Servatius, smartclip’s co-CEO, said that although some of the general use AI tools have picked up mainstream adoption, training AI technologies for specific business use cases is technically challenging.
“While using GenAI for general purposes normally is very intuitive, it is surprisingly complex to get it to work reliably in complex business environments. Our goal is to achieve meaningful outcomes for operational teams in and outside the media industry,” said Servatius. “The Sidekicks approach is also engineered to protect what makes an organisation competitive and to keep critical knowledge in-house.”
Back offices, not the boardroom
Speaking at a preview of the launch at Cannes last month, Servatius said his company’s focus, instead of creating flashy AI use cases which sound good in the boardroom, has been to develop tools which support people working in back-office roles.
“What we’re doing is using LLMs to solve very specific problems which users are having,” he said at Cannes. He showcased a specific example of an agent running inside Realytics’ TV Bee product which analyses campaign data from various TV channels, draws out insights, and then generates suggestions based on those insights.
At launch, Sidekicks will be made available to smartclip and Realytics clients, with pilot integrations for RTL Deutschland and Ad Alliance also planned. Bertelsmann, RTL Group’s parent company, will also explore use cases across a wider range of industries.
“Generative AI and agentic workflows hold enormous potential for Bertelsmann and the industries we serve,” said Rhys Nölke, Chief Data Officer at Bertelsmann. “With our AI Hub we are backing AI developments with group-wide adoption potential across key domains within Bertelsmann. Sidekicks stands out as a concrete, hands-on approach, with strong potential for cross-domain application. It’s not just relevant for the media and ad-tech industry, but for any business looking to embed smart automation into daily operations in a secure and sustainable way.”
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