Paul Harrison, CTO and co-founder at Simpli.fi chats about Simpli.fi’s new Autopilot AI and AI-Powered Media Planner and how it’s an enabler for modern marketers:

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Tell us about your journey to CTO

My journey was circuitous, but it gave me the perfect set of skills for what I do today and enables me to help Simpli.fi continue to grow for the future.

Alongside our CEO Frost Prioleau, I co-founded Simpli.fi 15 years ago, but the two of us have worked together for over two decades. Before Simpli.fi, Frost and I started a company together called Personifi that we sold to Collective Media where I served as the CTO. We were a customer of Google back then, and they were soliciting our input around the new frontiers of real-time-bidding. At this time, real-time-bidding did not exist. But the concept piqued my interest and I could tell there was a massive opportunity to use this tech to change the landscape of advertising – digital advertising specifically, especially when coupled with access to huge reservoirs of unstructured data. I also knew that with unique access to data we could get enough signal to noise ratio to be able to manage large volumes for small campaigns.

That’s where it all began for Simpli.fi… but before that, I helped develop software that mainly focused on the quote, bind, and issue of insurance online.

How has B2B SaaS as an industry changed over the years from your perspective?

The biggest thing we’re seeing in B2B SaaS is a shift away from traditional models towards more transactional models. You can see this playing out across the industry, where a business develops a SaaS platform, but in truth, they’re only charging based on what runs through the system. Now, it is more about ease of use and getting people comfortable with using your platforms on a transactional basis.

This trend started playing out during the COVID pandemic, when all these enterprises were bogged down with SaaS contracts and were desperately trying to reduce costs. But companies are no longer putting up with this model Companies are now reducing reliance on platforms, thinking more about paying as you go for transactions, and reallocating investment from SaaS to GenAI. Take ChatGPT, for example, it’s not necessarily a SaaS model, but they drive all these transactions, and that’s where the revenue comes from.

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We’d love to know the key highlights of Simpli.fi’s new Autopilot AI and the AI-Powered Media Planner. How are they changing the programmatic advertising game today?

AI is revolutionizing programmatic advertising. We knew we wanted to embrace this technology too, but it was incredibly important to us when developing AI products to create tools that were smarter and easier to use than everything else on the market. We didn’t want to use technology just for technology’s sake. We wanted to make that technology meaningful and actionable, and did so by utilizing our superior data. We are incredibly proud to now offer some of the most powerful, differentiated AI tools available. Our ability to lead in this area flows from our deep heritage in unstructured data, which is really the language of AI – no other company in adtech has our volume and heritage.

Our two new AI tools allow companies of all sizes to unlock the future of advertising through automation that enables greater efficiency and drives business growth. Simpli.fi Autopilot AI is an innovative AI-powered platform that can save businesses time and effort by making it easy to plan, launch, and monitor targeted ad campaigns in a few minutes, with no training. For example, if you’re a car dealership in Arizona, and you’ve never run an ad campaign before – or you’ve never developed an ad – Autopilot AI will guide you through a full funnel solution that can be up and running in five minutes, with no campaign minimum, plus low pay as you go credit card billing, ensuring an accessible price of entry. Another differentiator is the feedback that we offer – after activation, AI analyzes a campaign’s performance and makes recommendations that show advertisers what they are doing well and one area of improvement.

For more experienced agencies and marketers, Simpli.fi’s new Media Planner uses AI to translate marketing goals into a plan of action, leveraging the company’s wealth of programmatic media, data, and best practices to provide specific recommendations on bullet allocation, which audiences to target, and which media and data strategies will deliver the most impact. We  we will soon offer this service with search, social, campaign setup,  and linear media planning.

Overall, these tools will change the campaign setup, and allow advertisers to be more creative and targeted with their ads.

What about today’s state of programmatic advertising most interests you?

We’re incredibly excited about the industry pivot from linear to CTV – it’s a trend that will continue to grow as we push through 2025. We see so much innovation flowing out of CTV, and advertisers of all kinds are embracing it. In a world where getting in front of the right person is becoming increasingly difficult, Simpli.fi’s CTV offering combines the reach and engagement of TV with the precise targeting of digital. This allows us to maximize relevance to audiences of all kinds – whether they’re at home or on the go, watching on big screens or small. We’re delivering impactful streaming wherever our clients need to reach customers, with pinpoint accuracy and storytelling measurement.

What thoughts do you have surrounding adtech in 2025?

This is a transformative moment for our industry. With the rise of CTV and powerful AI innovations, we all have a front row seat to the democratization of advertising tech. For much of the past 20 years, large tier 1 advertisers have defined the category and delivered the best tools and campaigns. But this left small and midsize businesses on the sidelines. All that has changed, however, and I’m incredibly proud that Simpli.fi has had a hand in unshackling the global advertising industry – and moving it forward, so that everyone wins.

A few thoughts on how AI will influence the growth of adtech?

I anticipate we will see more and more on-device AI in the mobile space in the years ahead – AI that is built right into smartphones and does not rely on Cloud connections. Here again, we’re truly in an unmatched position. Not only does Simpli.fi have the best suite of AI tools, which will serve companies of all sizes, but our lead position in unstructured data gives us unique differentiation – and will support long-term growth for all our clients.

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