Agentic Commerce, AppsFlyer Hits $500M ARR, PayPal Media Network & 2026 Predictions

Including our 3 predictions for 2026. Read and bookmark to see if we get them right or wrong!

Happy 2026! We’re kicking off the first episode of the year (January 8th) with a lot to unpack. Between my recent skiing trip and Austin hitting his biggest mileage week ever in running, we’ve been busy—and the GTM world hasn’t slowed down either. From the “agentic” buzz at CES to massive revenue milestones in the martech space, here is what’s on our radar this week.

The Rise (and Reality) of Agentic Commerce

My feed has been absolutely flooded with talk about agentic commerce. The IAB (Internet Advertising Board) recently released an agentic roadmap, providing technical recommendations for how the adtech and martech industries can move toward AI-driven commerce.

However, we’re skeptical of the “single-shot” AI world where an agent just books a whole holiday for you without input. As Rory Sutherland pointed out on the Knowledge Project podcast, humans generally can’t choose in the absence of comparison. We want a menu of options, not a single dictated choice.

“A majority of purchases are still going to require choice and selection and preference and research on the part of human beings.” — Pranav

Austin notes that while agents are great for things you don’t care about—like finding a specific L-bracket for a home project—for things you do care about, like running shoes for a half marathon, you’re always going to want to apply your own preferences.

The Brand Measurement Trap

We also took a look at a new benchmarking report from Carilu (former CMO at Atlassian) and other former marketing leaders. The data shows that while demand generation still eats most of the budget, measurement remains the biggest blocker for brand investment. Only 28% of companies feel confident tying brand spend directly to pipeline.

“The reason why you don’t over invest in brand is not because you don’t believe in it; it’s because you don’t want to get fired by your co-founder or by your leader.” — Austin

We’re seeing a shift, though. Many B2C and B2B brands are moving away from hyper-targeted and direct response ads only to focusing on awareness and reach, letting the creative do the heavy lifting of finding the audience. With the proliferation of incrementality measurement tools and platforms, brand investments no longer have to be second class citizens for GTM teams.

Reddit Joins the “Max” Race: Automating the Historically Un-Targetable

If you’ve spent any time in media buying, you know that Reddit has historically been a difficult-to-target ad environment. It’s a land of niche communities and very specific subreddits where, in the past, you had to manually hunt down where your audience lived. But Reddit is finally following in the footsteps of Google and Meta by entering the “fully automated” race with the launch of Reddit Max campaigns.

What are Max Campaigns?

Think of this as Reddit’s version of Performance Max or Meta Advantage. Instead of you making a deterministic choice—like “I want to show up in r/marketing and r/growth”—you’re handing the keys to Reddit’s Community Intelligence. The system uses AI to automatically predict the connection between your campaign and various subreddits or conversation placements, determining where your impressions will have the most value.

Big Moves: AppsFlyer and PayPal

One of the biggest stories over the break was AppsFlyer passing $500M in ARR. There’s talk of a potential $3B to $4B acquisition by a private equity firm. It’s an impressive feat for a company in the attribution space, showing that despite the rise of probabilistic models, the “habit” of real-time, deterministic reporting isn’t going anywhere.

“I never predicted that they would get close to a billion dollars—certainly not the attribution space because it’s such a narrow piece of technology—but here they are, as big as Braze.” — Austin

Meanwhile, PayPal is turning into a closed-loop media network.

They are leveraging their transaction data so merchants can target users across other platforms like Meta or TikTok based on what they’ve actually bought. We expect to see others like Stripe or Square follow suit as first-party transaction data becomes the ultimate targeting mechanism.

Looking Ahead: Our 2026 Predictions

We wrapped up the episode by placing some bets on where we’ll be by the end of 2026.

• The Buyer Journey: Austin thinks 50% of the B2C journey will be handled by agents, while I’m betting lower on the B2B side—closer to 10% for enterprise buying cycles.

• SEO vs. AEO: Will Answer Engine Optimization replace SEO? Austin thinks AEO is just “hypercharged SEO” (doing the same thing, just faster), but I bet 90% of CMOs will claim they’ve made the switch just for the branding of it.

• Creative Workflow: We disagree here, too. Austin is at a 50% “coin flip” for AI-driven creative workflows, while I think the reality will be closer to 20-30% due to tool fatigue and a lack of standardized “easy buttons” for the whole process.

“In marketing, you should actually lead with the story and use the data to back up your gut. It’s not all science, as much as I would like to believe that.” — Austin

The Campaign Agent Opportunity

We ended with a call to action: in large companies like Walmart, the hard part of marketing isn’t the idea—it’s the 15 approval steps, legal compliance, and tool management. If someone builds an “Agentic Campaign Manager” that keeps marketers organized across their growing tech stack, call us. We’ll find you the investors.