It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room.
In marketing and media planning, we all have a “process”. For many of us, that usually involves a second monitor, a lukewarm cup of coffee, and a spreadsheet that’s starting to look like something out of The Matrix.
You stare at a brief that’s asking for “eco-conscious millennials who love hiking”, then you glance across as a drop-down menu populated with either Sports Enthusiasts or Green Living. Hardly the most granular of options. So, you make a choice. You choose the segment that’s good enough. Because it’s as close as you’re going to get without spending three days at your desk.
But that raises a rather uncomfortable question: Is “good enough” really good enough?
When your (or your client’s) budget is on the line, settling for guesswork is a gamble – but it’s not a strategy. And, frankly, you deserve better. At Criteo, we believe audience planning could do with a bit of a tune-up. It’s too manual, too imprecise, and too disconnected from the way people actually shop and buy.
So we created two new ways to make audience planning smarter, faster, and more streamlined than ever before.
Meet Audience Agent for Commerce Growth and Audience Planner for Commerce Grid.
Bridging the gap between guessing and knowing
Before we introduce the new tools, let’s take a step back and look at why we built them.
For years, we’ve been trapped in a cycle where we begin with an assumption (“I think my buyer looks like this demographic”) rather than a goal (“I need to acquire new customers who will actually buy”).
This gap between guessing and knowing creates two substantial problems:
- Users hate irrelevant ads. True personalization requires that you know who the user actually is, rather than who they look like on paper.
- Advertisers waste money targeting users who have zero intention of ever buying their products.
Of course, we keep working this way because the traditional workflow traps you between speed and confidence:
- The manual labor trap. This is the speed barrier. Mapping taxonomies row-by-row, formatting first-party data, and manually translating PDF briefs into targeting criteria takes forever. It’s the grunt work that keeps you eternally at arm’s length from the strategic work that really moves the needle.
- The demographic guessing trap. This is the confidence barrier. To move fast, we pretend that broad-brush proxies are the same thing as purchase intenders. We assume a 25-to-34-year-old is in the market for a starter home. We assume a visitor to a luxury blog is a “High Net Worth Individual”. But is this really true?
Until now, you had to choose. You could move fast by guessing, or you move with confidence by doing deep (and very slow) statistical work.
With Agentic Audiences, you don’t have to choose – you can have the best of both worlds.
AI handles the complex statistical heavy lifting instantly, allowing you to start with your goal and let the data find the buyer – effectively bridging the gap between guessing and knowing in seconds.
Meet the AI that thinks like a shopper
Rather than developing incremental upgrades to the status quo, we took a different path.
We already have exclusive access to the world’s largest open commerce dataset, but distilling that mountain of data into segments that actually help you hit your goals has historically involved some serious spreadsheet wrangling.
To give you a sense of the scale, we capture the shopping behaviors of around 720 million Daily Active Users shopping for 4.5 billion product SKUs across 3700 categories. This activity spans a massive ecosystem of over 17,000 advertiser clients, including around 4100 brands and more than 200 retail media networks. That sort of data delivers every tiny nuance of shopper behavior better than any demographic chart ever could. But you need a way to harness it.
Thanks to the Criteo AI Lab, we can now leverage agentic AI systems to make audience planning faster, easier, and driven by confidence rather than guesswork. Our Agentic Audiences solutions actively help you build the best possible audience strategy, translating billions of data points into a clear plan of action for you.
We’ve built two distinct experiences, each tailored to where (and how) you actually buy media.
For the performance marketer: Audience Agent
If you’re a brand marketer or a buyer in Criteo Commerce Growth, you already know that performance is everything. You need to find the people who are ready to buy, and you need to find them yesterday.
The Commerce Growth Audience Agent is an AI sidekick built to eliminate the guesswork and grunt work of audience planning. Even better, using it is as easy as having a conversation. Instead of manually selecting attributes from a library, you simply tell the tool what you want.
For example, instead of guessing that general “Outdoor Enthusiasts” are your target, you can focus strictly on the outcome. You might type a prompt like: “Create an audience to help me sell hiking and camping backpacks.“
In the past, building a segment like that would’ve taken you 20 minutes of digging around and cross-referencing. With Audience Agent, it’s done in seconds. Our agent pulls the freshest commerce data, identifies the behavioral patterns that match your request, and builds a precise, outcomes-based segment just for you.
But this agent does more than build lists. It assumes the role of an expert consultant that helps you navigate the platform.
Trying to master the nuance of every segment type can feel like you need a PhD in Criteo audiences. With Audience Agent, all of that pressure is gone. You can ask our agent questions like, “What’s the difference between an in-market audience and a behavioral one?” or “How should I use the relevancy score?” It gives you the answers you need to get buy-in on your strategy from your boss or your client, so you always know exactly why you made a choice.
Finally, because it relies on objective data rather than human assumptions, Audience Agent often surfaces connections you might otherwise miss. It might tell you that your audience is too niche and suggest a lookalike expansion. Or it could reveal a surprising link between categories that defies conventional logic but drives real conversions.
In short, you get a strategy built on what shoppers actually do, and not just what you think they do.
You can start using Audience Agent today in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, with more markets coming in 2026.
A quick look at the Commerce Growth Audience Agent in action
For agency buyers and curators: Audience Planner
Now, let’s hop over to the supply side for a moment.
If you’re an agency buyer or a curator working in Criteo Commerce Grid, your priorities are a bit different from those of your demand-side tools. You’re not looking for clicks – you’re looking to package deals. That means responding to complex RFPs that require you to bundle high-quality supply with highly specific audience data.
Your nemesis is the brief. Maybe it’s a PDF from a client that’s three pages long and full of really specific requests – and you have to turn it into a concrete media plan on a tight turnaround.
Fear not: the Commerce Grid Audience Planner is here to help.
That overwhelming PDF brief? You can upload it directly into the tool. Audience Planner will then use advanced AI to analyze the text, extract the key objectives, and instantly recommend the best commerce segments for your supply package. And it doesn’t stop there. Audience Planner also forecasts the reach and potential spend for those deals instantly.
Taken in the round, this means you can go from messy PDF to a neatly packaged PMP deal in a fraction of the time it used to take.
With Audience Planner, you can respond to more RFPs with richer, more accurate data. You can build highly customized supply deals backed by real-world commerce intent rather than vague contextual keywords.
So you can spend less time with your head in spreadsheets and more time crafting the perfect deal for your buyer.
You can start using Audience Planner today in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Japan, and South Korea, with more markets coming in 2026.
No grunt work. No guesswork. Just great work.
We didn’t create Agentic Audiences to replace strategists – quite the opposite. The goal here is to unshackle them from the busy work of audience planning.
Because when you remove the grunt work, you get your day back. That’s more time to think about creative messaging, competitive conquesting, and long-term growth.
And when you remove the guesswork, you get your confidence back. No more crossing your fingers and hoping the “Auto-Intenders” segment actually contains people who want to buy a car, because you know the audience is built on real transaction data and 20 years of expertise in AI-powered recommendation.
With Agentic Audiences, the days of settling for “good enough” are over.
Ready to see it in action? Talk to our team today or learn more about our industry leading commerce AI solutions.
