Executive Harbor Experience

Your bidder still clears the auction on a codebase written for a market that no longer exists. Leaders from the SSP, DSP and platform side spend three hours on the Hudson working through what agentic AI actually changes – auction logic, cost per decision, and the modernization backlog that keeps losing to the roadmap.

What's on the table

Three things breaking in the stack — and what agents do about them

No panel, no slideware. Just the people running bidders, exchanges and platform engineering, working through the problems that don't have clean answers yet.

BIDDING ENGINES

Auction logic is hard-coded, QPS costs keep climbing, and every tuning decision ships on a release cycle.

WHERE IT
HURTS

Bid shading, floors and throttling get tuned against aggregates that are already stale. Cost per decision creeps up quarter over quarter and nobody can point at the line item causing it.

WHAT AGENTS
CHANGE

Agents that tune shading and floor logic against live outcomes, simulate the change before it touches traffic, and put a recommendation in front of a human instead of into a dashboard nobody opens.

SSP & DSP convergence

Everyone is building both sides. Curation, direct paths and bespoke deals are multiplying faster than the integration team.

WHERE IT
HURTS

Every curated deal is custom engineering. Duplicate hops and MFA domains leak spend for weeks, because tracing a supply path end to end is still manual forensics.

WHAT AGENTS
CHANGE

Agents that tune shading and floor logic against live outcomes, simulate the change before it touches traffic, and put a recommendation in front of a human instead of into a dashboard nobody opens.

Tech debt

The platform runs on a decade-old bidder, a monolith nobody wants to touch, and pipelines built for a different volume of data.

WHERE IT
HURTS

Modernization has been a three-year roadmap item for four years. It loses to feature work every planning cycle, and the engineers who understood the original design have moved on.

WHAT AGENTS
CHANGE

Agents that read the codebase, produce the dependency map, then refactor and test module by module — turning modernization into a continuous background process instead of a project that needs its own budget.

Bring the problem you haven't solved. The partners on board have built against all three.

The Schedule

Chelsea Piers, Pier 61

DATE

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

VESSEL

Hornblower Lexington

Two decks, climate-controlled, open-air aft lounge

DEPARTS

Pier 61, Chelsea Piers

61 Chelsea Piers, New York, NY 10011

RETURNS

Pier 61 — same berth

ONBOARD

Hors d'oeuvres, buffet lunch

Premium open bar for the full sailing

ATTIRE

Business casual

Flat shoes recommended on deck

CAPACITY

Limited guests

Registration is reviewed; seats confirmed by email

12:30 PM

Boarding opens at Pier 61. Arrive early — the gangway closes at 12:55.

1:00 PM

Cast off. Lunch and bar service begin.

2:15 PM

Skyline pass — the good part of the harbor loop.

4:00 PM

Back at Pier 61, disembark.

REGISTRATION

Seats are limited. Please share your information to request a seat for this event.

Made possible by

Your hosts on board

AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner. Application modernization, data platforms and AI-native product engineering — delivered by teams that have shipped it before.

Cloud-native log analytics, observability and security monitoring built for AWS workloads — so you find the problem before your customers do.

Frontier models and the API behind them — for teams moving AI from pilot to production without rebuilding the stack twice.

The lakehouse behind the bidder — unifying campaign, supply and outcome data so the models tuning your auction are trained on something current.

Partner 5

Sponsor slot open