Have you found it challenging in your career to be a woman? 

Utzschneider: I’ve been really fortunate. I grew up in tech and Big Tech. In Big Tech, it is so important that you discover your voice early.

What I mean by that is the first 10 years of Microsoft, my whole career was basically out of New York, flying to the West Coast. There was no Zoom. So what that meant was good, old-fashioned conference calls. I was based in New York and the companies were headquartered on the West Coast. They couldn’t see me, they could only hear me. I was often the only person dialing in remotely, and I’ve probably done thousands of calls where I’m the only woman on the call. 

I learned very early: Be completely prepped going on the call. I used to write out: Here are the three points I’m going to make. Make sure I make them in the first 15 minutes of the call, make sure I projected all this stuff and make sure if people were interrupting me, talking over me, I’d call them out on the call. I’d follow up after the call and say, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you realize you just interrupted me. Give me space on the call.’ 

I was very intentional about it in developing that muscle, and the earlier you can develop that muscle, it becomes second nature, so I’m so accustomed to having to make sure you have a presence, you’re prepared, and your voice is clearly heard. 

It’s not like now I walk around thinking I’m a female CEO. I think of myself as a tech CEO. 

IAS has had a great year so far, with revenue growth in the teens for the last several quarters. Tell me about the company’s success and how you’re driving it as CEO.

We have six company values, and one is customer obsession. We are very intentional about what we build, the type of technology we invest in, how we innovate—always on behalf of the customers. 

When you take a look at where marketers are shifting their budgets and testing, it’s two key areas where users are spending their time: social platforms and CTV. 

When you take a look at some of the technology we built, it is incredibly sophisticated. It is powered by AI. We are in the live feeds of the social platforms, we are classifying video, image, audio, text, and we’re processing a lot of data. This is all around to help the L’Oreals and Disneys of the world to make sure wherever they’re running their digital ads on the social platforms is adjacent to appropriate content. 

To give you a sense of how much data we’re processing and the role of AI, two years ago we were processing two years of digital video content a day. Fast forward to today, we’re processing 50 years of digital video content a day. It’s massive amounts of data, massive amounts of signals. The more [high quality] data you process, the more you can train the models, the faster the accuracy of detecting the appropriate and inappropriate stuff at higher velocity. The technology is super cool. 

In terms of identifying things within the platforms or web, we’re also very focused at taking the human out of the loop, training the models to be able to detect without humans. We’ve gotten to a place now that 97% of our model validation has no human in the loop. Our AI labeling is 29x faster and 45% more precise than human annotators.

That tech is a huge differentiator for us. It illustrates the value that we’re driving for our brands and the investments that we’re making in all things tech and AI.

Where do you see digital advertising going in the next few years? 

I think AI is going to play a role. I do think there’s a future where the majority of all creative is created by AI. The major platforms like Google or Meta are investing billions and billions of dollars into their advertising platforms and leveraging AI to drive optimization outcome, higher ROI. 

For brands, there’s less transparency in terms of what’s happening behind the curtain, the black box. The platforms leveraging AI end-to-end, from the creative generation to the media planning, media buying, I think will all be powered by AI.

What does that do for the human workforce?

It will just evolve. The thing is, AI is a tool. It’s a very important tool, and I think that there are plenty of opportunities in the future in advertising for humans to play a role. There are certain things AI can’t do. For example, human relationships, and that’s something brands deeply care about. 

It’s too soon to tell, but it’s incredibly exciting just how fast it’s moving. We are front and center in AI. A third of our engineering org is made up of data scientists, and we’ll continue to invest in AI.