LAS VEGAS – At CES 2026, Comcast’s NBCUniversal rolled out an idea that sounds futuristic but solves an old headache: buying live sports ads without losing your sanity.
Ryan McConville, chief product officer and EVP of ad products at NBCUniversal, said the company is testing agentic AI to automate live sports buying across streaming and linear TV.
That second part matters more than most people admit.
Linear TV still eats most of the pie
Despite streaming’s glow-up, McConville noted that linear television still accounts for about 80% of impressions in market. Programmatic tools mainly touch streaming, while linear workflows remain manual, bespoke and email-heavy.
“Live sports is bigger than just the programmatic footprint,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan.
NBCU’s goal is to automate the entire sports package, not just the shiny digital slice.
Agents that plan, buy and traffic – without coffee breaks
NBCU partnered with FreeWheel, Newton Research and agency RPA to build a proof of concept using agentic AI.
The system lets software agents plan, optimize, activate, and measure campaigns across linear and streaming inventory. Think fewer spreadsheets. More machines politely negotiating with other machines.
Agents ingest impression data, split budgets, choose ad units and even set up linear trafficking and digital deals. McConville called live sports “ripe for further automation,” which is tech-speak for “why are humans still doing this part.”
Standardization, but make it interoperable
One hurdle is fragmentation. Agentic buying only works if systems can talk to each other.
McConville pointed to new industry roadmaps from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, applying existing standards to agentic workflows. At the center is MCP, an AI protocol that lets agents securely share data while staying bespoke.
“It standardizes how agents plug in together,” McConville said, “without making everyone identical.”
In the NBCU test, FreeWheel and NBCU each ran seller agents. Newton built a buyer agent. The agents did the talking. Humans watched nervously.
Forecasting reach, now with fewer guesses
One eye-opening feature was forecasting. Buyer agents could ask: What happens to household reach with a 50/50 linear-streaming split? What about 30/70? Or 80/20?
NBCU’s forecasting models answered instantly. Agencies could even bring their own models, wrapped as agents, to challenge NBCU’s math.
McConville framed it as orchestration, not replacement. The models argue. The planner wins.
Premium automation, not bargain-basement TV
McConville described the strategy as “premium automation.”
This is not remnant inventory flying through pipes at warp speed. Live sports ads are expensive, curated, and reputationally risky. They still need human judgment.
Agentic AI handles the logistics so people can focus on creative, strategy, and clients who ask difficult questions. Automation does the busywork. Humans keep the taste.
FreeWheel’s quiet but critical role
Comcast’s adtech unit FreeWheel sits where many plans end up: execution. Agentic plans can be passed directly into FreeWheel as delivery instructions, including targeting parameters and creative approvals.
That shortens timelines and lowers friction for buyers with fewer resources. McConville said it could even expand the market by making premium TV easier to access.
Fewer emails. Faster launches. Less “just circling back.”
The endgame: less logistics, more thinking
McConville said the biggest payoff is human, not technical. Agentic workflows free sales and operations teams from daily back-and-forth. That time shifts toward strategy, relationships and solving problems machines still avoid.
In short, AI handles the plumbing. People design the house.
At CES, NBCU’s message was clear: Live sports advertising is still premium. It’s just finally learning to move at machine speed.
You’re watching “Tailwinds of Transformation, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at CES 2026, presented by FreeWheel” For more videos from this summit, please visit this page.
