Locala brought together senior marketing leaders from across APAC for a closed-door roundtable luncheon in Singapore to discuss how AI and agentic technologies are changing the way brands approach media planning, activation, and consumer engagement.

The discussion gathered marketers from the automotive, FMCG, retail, healthcare, hospitality, and finance sectors to examine a growing challenge for the industry: as AI makes it possible to process more information and automate more tasks, how can marketers use that intelligence to make better decisions?

The conversation highlighted that the challenge facing advertisers today is not a lack of data or technology. Brands increasingly have access to signals across audiences, locations, channels, and consumer behaviour, yet connecting those signals into a clear understanding of where opportunities exist and how media investment should respond remains difficult.

"AI gives advertisers the opportunity to rethink much more than how quickly we execute campaigns. The bigger opportunity is to rethink how decisions are made in the first place," said Christophe Collet, CEO of Locala. "Advertising should start with an understanding of the business: where growth can come from, where new customers can be found, and what is changing in each market. Technology can then help turn that understanding into decisions that continuously adapt as those realities evolve."

This complexity becomes even more pronounced across APAC, where consumer behaviour, competitive conditions, and business potential can differ considerably not only between markets, but within them. A strategy that makes sense nationally may not reflect the realities of individual cities, districts or store catchment areas.

For advertisers, this raises a bigger question about the role AI should play in media. Rather than simply accelerating existing workflows, the discussion pointed to an opportunity for agentic technology to help marketers interpret complexity, evaluate different courses of action, and translate intelligence into strategic decisions.

"AI has already shown that it can make many parts of marketing faster, but speed alone doesn't necessarily make a media decision better," said Vincent Pang, managing director, APAC at Locala. "What matters is whether we can use that intelligence to understand where the business opportunity actually is, which audiences matter and how strategy should change based on what is happening in each market."

The roundtable also explored how marketers are beginning to use AI across different areas of their operations, from evaluating media plans and streamlining repetitive processes to accelerating content production and personalising customer engagement.

At the same time, the discussion reinforced that greater automation does not remove the need for human judgement. Cultural context, brand knowledge and an understanding of local consumer behaviour remain essential, particularly across a region as diverse as APAC.

For Locala, this intersection between intelligence, business context, and human decision-making sits at the heart of the shift from agentic technology towards Adaptive Advertising.

Adaptive Advertising is the ability to continuously adjust media, audience, geography, creative, and investment based on changing business and consumer reality, market by market. Rather than treating AI as an additional layer of automation, it connects market understanding directly to the decisions advertisers make about where and how to invest.

"The real value of agentic technology is its ability to help advertisers move from insight to action, and then keep adapting as conditions change," said Grant Gudgel, chief marketing officer at Locala. "When media strategy is grounded in the realities of the business, marketers can respond to different opportunities across markets and continuously adjust their decisions around the outcomes that matter most to growth."

By combining AI agents with market, audience, and location intelligence, Locala helps advertisers identify business opportunities and translate those insights into media strategies that can be planned, activated, and measured across channels.

As AI becomes increasingly embedded across the advertising ecosystem, the discussion pointed to an important evolution for marketers: the value of the technology will not be determined by how much work it can automate, but by how effectively it can help brands understand changing realities and adapt their decisions accordingly.