Chalice AI, the platform-independent AI media decisioning company, announced a partnership with Equativ, the leading independent media platform, to bring containerized AI decisioning into Equativ’s curation and activation platform. The collaboration expands adoption of the IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic Real-Time Framework (ARTF) and advances the use of portable AI models across programmatic workflows.

As AI moves from experimentation into production, advertisers and agencies are seeking systems that can operate across platforms without being locked into a single environment. This partnership enables Chalice’s custom AI models to be deployed as containerized agents within Equativ’s infrastructure, allowing decisioning and execution to operate together within standardized, interoperable frameworks.

Through this integration, media buyers can activate Chalice’s outcome-driven AI bidding models directly within the Maestro by Equativ media platform, allowing them to score and select impressions in real time based on predicted performance, dynamically adjust bid pricing, and continuously optimize toward specific business outcomes such as conversions or cost per action.

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“Equativ’s adoption of sellside decisioning under ARTF marks exactly the kind of forward-looking partnership we built Chalice to enable,” said Adam Heimlich, CEO of Chalice AI. “When a supply-side platform deploys AI within the auction environment using an open, standardized framework, it creates real value for advertisers — not just faster decisioning, but smarter, more accountable outcomes. This is what the unbundling of programmatic looks like in practice.”

Curation has emerged as a critical control point in programmatic advertising. By introducing containerized AI into Equativ’s environment, Chalice enables its proprietary dynamic, impression-level decisioning aligned to advertiser-defined outcomes.

By integrating Chalice’s engine directly into the supply layer, optimization decisions can be made with high signal fidelity and at the impression level. This approach allows curation and activation to function as a unified system, improving both transparency and performance.

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“Containerized AI curation fundamentally changes where intelligence sits in the supply chain,” said Curt Larson, Chief Innovation Officer at Equativ. “By moving intelligence closer to the supply through curation, buyers gain control and access to the granular, page-level signals that truly matter: how ads are laid out, how audiences actually engage, and what the environment really looks and feels like.”

The partnership builds on Chalice and Equativ’s work advancing containerized AI within programmatic infrastructure and supporting emerging standards like ARTF, which enable AI agents to operate directly within live media transactions. By deploying AI models as portable containers, Chalice and Equativ are enabling a more open and interoperable ecosystem where decisioning can move seamlessly across platforms.

As advertisers look to operationalize AI at scale, standards-based interoperability is becoming essential. This collaboration extends that interoperability into curation and activation workflows, allowing brands and agencies to apply custom AI decisioning across more of the programmatic supply chain.