2025 in Revenue Operations and a Prediction for 2026: “FOMO meets Reality Check”

Recapping 2025, a year that was filled with significant projects for Conde Nast, Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, WebMD, New England Journal of Medicine and Chartbeat. The work spanned 8 countries across North America, South America, UK, Europe (Italy, France, Germany, Spain) and the Middle East. The platforms included CRM, OMS, Ad Serving, BI, Billing and AI. The scope of work included managing the RFP process, project management for deployment of new platforms, configuration, ETL work for data migrations, testing and training.

Moving forward, we think 2026 will be an atypical year for one singular reason. No surprise that it is centered around AI.

“FOMO* meets Reality Check”.

In 2026 +, the headline for publishers (and agencies) will be “FOMO meets Reality Check”. Revenue Operations professionals will be examining AI driven solutions because they will be compelled to by their management and their peers. They will need to consider the following when it comes to AI-enabled platforms supporting sales and media operations:

Are the benefits of the AI solution confined to single aspect of workflow, such as media planning?

Is the vendor’s AI solution fully developed, with a track record of supporting major clients? Or is it a work in progress?

Can KPI’s be defined to determine the effectiveness the AI solution, as it becomes integrated into the ad stack?

Will the addition of an AI enabled platform increase operational efficiency, or will it add yet another series of steps on top of the existing end to end workflow?

How will data produced by the AI platform be integrated into existing business intelligence platforms?

How will the AI solution be integrated with existing platforms (CRM, Ad Serving, etc.)?

There will be significant benefits from AI over the course of time. But for the short terms, we expect Publishers and Agencies to spend a good amount of time defining exactly where and how it is incorporated in their end-to-end workflow. Of course, we can help with this.

Happy Holidays and looking forward to an exciting New Year.

Doug Wintz
www.dmwmediablog.com
www.dmwmediaworks.com

*FOMO = Fear of Missing Out”

(AI was NOT used in the composition of this post)