Smartly
Smartly Innovation & Technology Culture
Frequently Asked Questions
Smartly is highly innovative because AI is built into both its product and the way it solves advertising’s hardest workflow challenges. Its unified platform connects media, creative and intelligence in one end-to-end system, allowing brands to move from idea to ad with AI-powered workflows such as generating creative from a product page, creating on-brand assets and copy variations, adapting assets across channels and optimizing budgets with real-time performance data. That integrated approach gives Smartly a distinctive advantage: it improves creative and media performance together rather than treating them as separate steps.
Innovation at Smartly is also continuous and measurable. The company has invested in AI for more than a decade, launched Smartly AI Studio to turn a single asset into channel-ready creative at scale and built features like AI search and conversational insights to help customers find winning assets and understand performance faster. Its teams work closely across data science, engineering and product to move quickly from experimentation to production, and that pace of iteration supports a platform already used by more than 700 brands and advertisers.
Smartly’s technology is modern by design, built around AI-powered advertising, automation, real-time data, and scalable platform architecture. The platform brings creative, media, and intelligence together so marketers can plan, build, optimize, and measure advertising in one connected workflow.
AI-powered advertising platform: Smartly is moving beyond AI as a support tool toward deeper AI orchestration across its product suite. Its technology helps automate complex advertising workflows, connect creative and media performance, and support smarter decision-making for global brands.
Modern engineering foundation: Smartly’s platform is built for high-volume, data-heavy advertising automation. Teams work with modern technologies such as TypeScript, React, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, and AWS to support real-time data flows, reliability, and scale.
Scalable creative and media automation: Smartly helps brands manage complex advertising across channels by combining creative production, media optimization, automation, and performance intelligence. This allows teams to improve both the ads themselves and the spend behind them.
Future-facing AI innovation: Smartly is investing in AI-assisted development, generative AI, large language models, and prompt-first workflows where users can collaborate more naturally with AI. The company’s modular platform approach helps it adopt new AI capabilities without needing to rebuild from scratch.
Built for global scale: Smartly’s technology supports enterprise advertisers with large-scale, real-time workflows across creative, media, and data. The focus is not just on using modern tools, but on building reliable systems that help customers move faster, improve performance, and adapt to the future of advertising.
Smartly adopts new tech quickly because AI has been core to the business for years, not layered on as an afterthought. The company has invested in AI for the past decade, built its platform to connect creative, media and intelligence in one workflow, and moved fast when generative AI emerged by expanding from traditional machine learning into tools that help customers go from idea to ad at scale. That speed shows up in product launches like Smartly AI Studio, which brought capabilities such as turning a single asset into channel-ready video, building ads from a URL and reshaping raw footage into new cuts.
The pace is reinforced by how Smartly works internally. Data scientists, ML engineers and product engineers build shoulder to shoulder from prototype to production, teams carve out dedicated time for experimentation, and early versions get into customers' hands quickly so the product can be refined around real use cases. Smartly also gives employees hands-on ways to deepen AI expertise across technical and customer-facing roles, which helps new tools move from exploration to practical adoption fast.
The technology culture at Smartly is fast-moving, collaborative and deeply rooted in AI. Teams build for a product where AI has been central for years, not added on later, and that shows up in how data scientists, product engineers and ML engineers work shoulder to shoulder from prototype to production. The company creates space for experimentation, hands-on learning and rapid iteration, and employees across technical and customer-facing roles build practical expertise in AI through subject matter expert programs, cross-functional projects and continuous exposure to evolving tools and workflows.
The culture also emphasizes growth, openness and inclusion alongside technical ambition. Smartly gives people room to stretch into bigger roles, values direct and frequent feedback, and uses clear frameworks for development so progress is visible and earned. Engineers are supported by a leadership team with strong representation of women, employee resource groups and regular forums for sharing ideas, which reinforces a workplace where different perspectives are welcomed and innovation is expected. Hybrid work, global collaboration and regular in-person connection add to a culture that feels both internationally connected and highly team-oriented.
Smartly Employee Perspectives
Describe Smartly’s relationship with AI. What’s the user value in the AI in your product, and what makes this unique?
Smartly is an AI-powered adtech company with a mission to transform the advertising experience for brands and consumers. Our advertising platform combines media, creative and intelligence, offering end-to-end workflows powered by AI across the open and closed web.
We have been investing in AI solutions for the past decade, deeply integrating AI across our product offering. We use AI for media optimization to enhance our customers’ advertising performance. This includes predictive budget allocation, which leverages real-time data to dynamically adjust strategies and maximize budget efficiency. We also use AI for creative optimization, combining dynamic creative optimization with creative intelligence. This allows customers to test ad creatives at scale and easily refine them based on audience preferences.
What sets us apart is our ability to connect creative and media optimization in a unique way. Our AI can improve creatives at scale based on real-time performance metrics, helping customers optimize ad spend and continuously iterate to build the best possible creatives tailored to each specific audience.
Tell the story of how AI has evolved at Smartly. What was life like for customers before it was used, and what are your product teammates excited about when it comes to the future of AI at Smartly?
At Smartly, our journey with AI began with more traditional machine learning, as we developed automatic optimization capabilities for large-scale advertisers. Before AI, our customers had to optimize their advertising strategies manually, which was not only time-consuming, but also made it nearly impossible to achieve the same level of performance gains.
As the AI landscape evolved and expanded, so did we. Although generative AI has been trending only recently, we made strategic investments in Gen AI before it gained popularity. For example, we acquired a Silicon Valley startup that has been a part of our AI journey.
With AI at Smartly’s core, it’s no surprise that we have a large number of advanced customers already successfully using Gen AI to enhance ad creatives and optimize marketing workflows. In addition to our top-performing early adopters, another significant portion of our customer base has begun testing and integrating Gen AI into their processes. While leveraging Gen AI with Smartly continues to grow rapidly, we know there’s still untapped potential that we’re excited to unlock.
What opportunities do Smartly employees have to advance their AI careers?
Since AI is central to everything we do, all of our employees should have a solid understanding of the AI capabilities we offer. That’s why we provide subject matter expert programs that allow those who are in customer-facing roles to become experts in our AI solutions and how they can address customer challenges. SME programs enable hands-on learning and engaging in deep AI discussions with customers.
Technical roles offer great opportunities to collaborate closely with AI, particularly within our data science and engineering teams. Our data scientists focus on experimentation and new AI models, while engineers work on incorporating these AI advancements into their own product areas. This means engineers, designers and product managers get to work hands-on with AI technologies, collaborating on cutting-edge projects that shape the future of digital advertising.
What is the unique story that you feel your company has with AI? If you were writing about it, what would the title of your blog be?
Smartly’s relationship with AI isn’t a recent bolt-on — it’s the spine that has held our platform together since day one. Because we serve the entire advertising journey, our machine learning layer has context across both the creative and media sides of a marketer’s world. That dual vantage point lets us extract insights, scale creatives and optimize media with a holistic view.
When generative AI exploded onto the scene, we didn’t scramble to retrofit; we accelerated. Today, Smartly uses AI to help you go from idea to ad and powers workflows such as pulling a product page, generating on-brand backgrounds, crafting copy variations based on your brand voice, assembling channel-specific aspect ratios and optimizing campaign budgets — often before a human could have built the first brief.
The result for our customers is measurable: faster launch cycles, leaner production budgets and media spend that continuously self-optimizes. Our unique story is simple: Smartly goes beyond isolated AI features by powering the entire marketing engine — transforming sparks of inspiration into business outcomes at high speed and scale. Our blog would read: “From Idea to Ad and Beyond.”
What was a monumental moment for your team when it comes to your work with AI?
A key milestone for our AI work came when we launched the Smartly AI Studio in general availability earlier this year. With that release, our customers gained practical tools to transform a single static asset into channel-ready videos, build ads straight from a URL at scale, reshape raw footage into new narrative cuts and much more. We’ve seen a 30x increase in productivity and 27 percent improved performance in our AI Studio case studies, and we’re excited to be improving on these gains going forward.
Looking ahead, we’re focused on extending those gains beyond creative production. Two examples of such improvements include AI search and conversational insights. AI search adds a multimodal layer over historical assets and results. A natural-language query like “Christmas-themed holiday videos” now surfaces the relevant creatives in seconds. Conversational Insights offers a chat interface for performance questions. Rather than dig through metrics and reports yourself, let AI do the work and surface the insights automatically.
Our next chapter at Smartly is about turning AI from a feature into a steady partner in solving more complex challenges and workflows.
Smartly's Tech Stack
