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#12 – Billion Dollar Ideas: AI’s impact on the digital economy [Brian O'Kelley | CEO, Scope3]
“If this works, we can make the entire global economy a trillion dollars bigger… That’s a massive opportunity for humanity.” — Brian O’Kelley
Brian O’Kelley has made over $2B in selling his businesses — Inventor of the ad exchange, former CEO of AppNexus (acquired for $1.6B), Right Media (acquired for $600M) and now CEO of Scope3 — has shaped the economic and technical foundations of the open internet. In this episode, Samraj speaks with Brian about AI, agentic ecosystems, sustainability, and why the future of advertising will reward experimentation over determinism.
A sharp, fast-moving conversation on trillion-dollar market shifts, the collapse of legacy ad models, new protocols, and what AI-native companies understand that incumbents don’t.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
0:00 ➤ Intro / Guest Welcome
3:10 ➤ Early Amex work: real-time prediction & billion-dollar outcomes
8:35 ➤ Inventing the ad exchange & the Yahoo exit
12:40 ➤ Bayesian models, decision trees & scaling the early web
16:10 ➤ Pivotal moments: header bidding, curation & industry “diaspora”
20:40 ➤ Leadership lessons: conviction, humility & learning from failure
24:20 ➤ How a psychologist wife reshaped Brian’s understanding of people
26:50 ➤ Brian’s AI “wow moment”: when LLMs overtook adtech tooling
30:10 ➤ Brand safety becomes a feature, not a market
32:30 ➤ Pull-based AI search & the new brand suitability challenge
34:40 ➤ Agents as personal shoppers & breaking the tyranny of scale
38:20 ➤ Experimentation vs determinism: the trillion-dollar upside
42:10 ➤ Beyond DSPs: new buying models & shifting economics
47:00 ➤ Big tech, retailers & why AI-native companies win the next decade
50:10 ➤ Building agentic infrastructure in months, not years
53:10 ➤ Ethics & Brian’s closing question to the audience
🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/034vux8EWzb9M5Gn6QDMza
🎧 Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-lyceum/id1837737167
🎧 Listen on Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5a67f821-89f8-4b95-b873-2933ab977cd3/the-ai-lyceum
🌐 Learn more: https://theailyceum.com
#ai #artificialintelligence #aiethics #marketing #advertising #tech #genai #theailyceum #brianokelley #adtech
View all episodes
By Samraj Matharu“If this works, we can make the entire global economy a trillion dollars bigger… That’s a massive opportunity for humanity.” — Brian O’Kelley
Brian O’Kelley has made over $2B in selling his businesses — Inventor of the ad exchange, former CEO of AppNexus (acquired for $1.6B), Right Media (acquired for $600M) and now CEO of Scope3 — has shaped the economic and technical foundations of the open internet. In this episode, Samraj speaks with Brian about AI, agentic ecosystems, sustainability, and why the future of advertising will reward experimentation over determinism.
A sharp, fast-moving conversation on trillion-dollar market shifts, the collapse of legacy ad models, new protocols, and what AI-native companies understand that incumbents don’t.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
0:00 ➤ Intro / Guest Welcome
3:10 ➤ Early Amex work: real-time prediction & billion-dollar outcomes
8:35 ➤ Inventing the ad exchange & the Yahoo exit
12:40 ➤ Bayesian models, decision trees & scaling the early web
16:10 ➤ Pivotal moments: header bidding, curation & industry “diaspora”
20:40 ➤ Leadership lessons: conviction, humility & learning from failure
24:20 ➤ How a psychologist wife reshaped Brian’s understanding of people
26:50 ➤ Brian’s AI “wow moment”: when LLMs overtook adtech tooling
30:10 ➤ Brand safety becomes a feature, not a market
32:30 ➤ Pull-based AI search & the new brand suitability challenge
34:40 ➤ Agents as personal shoppers & breaking the tyranny of scale
38:20 ➤ Experimentation vs determinism: the trillion-dollar upside
42:10 ➤ Beyond DSPs: new buying models & shifting economics
47:00 ➤ Big tech, retailers & why AI-native companies win the next decade
50:10 ➤ Building agentic infrastructure in months, not years
53:10 ➤ Ethics & Brian’s closing question to the audience
🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/034vux8EWzb9M5Gn6QDMza
🎧 Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-lyceum/id1837737167
🎧 Listen on Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5a67f821-89f8-4b95-b873-2933ab977cd3/the-ai-lyceum
🌐 Learn more: https://theailyceum.com
#ai #artificialintelligence #aiethics #marketing #advertising #tech #genai #theailyceum #brianokelley #adtech