A century-old media brand is using AI agents to compress proposal turnaround from days to hours and keep every campaign on pace, a blueprint for how legacy publishers compete in the AI era

Kana, the agentic marketing platform founded by the team behind Krux (acquired by Salesforce) and Rapt (acquired by Microsoft), today announced that the global media brand TIME has deployed two of Kana's agentic marketing applications across its advertising and sales organizations.

The rollout marks one of the most visible examples yet of a publisher rebuilding its commercial engine around autonomous AI agents rather than stapling AI onto existing workflows. "Modern publishing isn't just about content anymore. We’re excited to be proving out what agentic media actually looks like by dramatically augmenting and accelerating our core business processes," said Mark Howard, Chief Operating Officer at TIME.

TIME's ad operations team is using Kana's Campaign Orchestrator application to continuously monitor delivery, pacing and performance across every live campaign, catching under-delivery risk before it becomes a make-good, and finding more opportunities to optimize campaigns. Its sales organization has rolled out Kana's Media Proposal Generator fleet-wide, automating the translation of inbound RFPs into fully structured, inventory-aware proposals. It has transformed a process that formerly took days into minutes, giving every member of their sales team immediate access to best-practice pricing and packaging.

"Transforming our RFP process with agentic marketing has enabled us to streamline operations, collapse complexity, and meet the market at the apex speed it now expects,” said Melanie Ruderman, SVP, Strategy & Sales Enablement at TIME.

Together, the two deployments reflect a broader shift underway at TIME: treating agentic AI not as an experiment, but as core infrastructure for how the company sells, delivers, and scales advertising in a media landscape being reshaped by AI on every side, from how audiences discover content to how advertisers plan against it.

"Reporting and analytics against various ad products in a campaign has always been a time consuming task for ad operations," said Monica Wood, Vice President of Ad Operations at TIME. “Kana has given us the strategic decisionmaking power and time savings that allow us to focus on the elements of performance and delivery that are critical to our future growth.”

Built for Publishers Operating at Enterprise Scale

Both Kana solutions operate inside guardrails TIME's teams control directly: budget limits, brand and pricing guidance, and approval thresholds that determine when an agent acts autonomously versus when it escalates to a human for sign-off.

“So much of the focus on deploying AI in marketing tends to emphasize flashier use cases, but the organizations seeing the most economic upside are those like TIME who are using AI to reinvent internal processes that drive measurable top-line growth, collapse cost, and augment knowledge work,” said Tom Chavez, Co-Founder and CEO of Kana. “TIME has been publishing continuously through the advents of television, cable, digital, and social. Watching them apply that same instinct for reinvention to their own sales and operations infrastructure, and do it with agentic AI, is exactly the kind of transformation we built Kana for."

About Kana

Founded in 2025 by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, the marketing technology pioneers behind Krux, Rapt, and Habu, Kana delivers agentic marketing applications custom-built to your goals and architecture with enterprise-grade scale and security. Backed by Mayfield. Based in San Francisco. Learn more at kana.ai.

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"Modern publishing isn't just about content anymore. We’re excited to be proving out what agentic media actually looks like by dramatically augmenting and accelerating our core business processes," said Mark Howard, Chief Operating Officer at TIME.