Most Companies Are Building on Sand: How to Future-Proof Your AI Stack

The storm is coming. Only those with the right foundation will endure.

There’s a parable about two builders. One builds his house on rock. The other, on sand. When the storm comes, only one remains standing.

We’re standing at the edge of a seismic shift, one that will eclipse the dot-com boom and move faster than the mobile revolution. And yet, many companies in media, marketing, and advertising technology are still operating on fragile, outdated foundations, hoping quick fixes will hold when the real pressure sets in.

Everyone is playing with AI. Few are actually ready for it.

AI Strategy Gaps

Most media and AdTech companies’ AI strategies fail because they retrofit old systems instead of building for autonomous agents.

In boardrooms and off-sites, the directive is clear: “Figure out our AI strategy.” But for many older or scaled companies, the path quickly devolves into smoke and mirrors. They slap “AI-powered” on every product one-sheeter. They launch internal AI task forces and hire interns to tinker with siloed use cases. They spin up pilots that generate headlines but never integrate with real operations. Marketing outpaces engineering. Demos replace durability.

The systems they’re trying to modernize were built for human throughput—batch logic, manual optimization, linear workflows. They were never designed for autonomous agents or intelligent orchestration. But instead of rearchitecting, many simply retrofit.

You can’t duct-tape your way to being AI-native.

The Rise of AI-Native Startups

Meanwhile, a new lineup of players is stepping onto the court. There’s a basketball team’s worth of AI-native startups emerging – each with a different thesis, a different layer of the stack, a different idea about what agents should do and how they should interact with data, teams, and each other. We’ve watched as much of the industry lumps them all into one bucket: “AI startups.” That oversimplification makes it harder for decision-makers to invest wisely or adopt solutions that align with their actual needs. Without understanding the nuanced capabilities and philosophies behind these companies, the risk isn’t just missing the next big thing, it’s betting on the wrong one. The nuance too often gets lost. The questions many aren’t asking yet are the ones that will matter most. Are they building infrastructure or applications? Are they augmenting workflows or automating them outright? Are they tackling yield optimization, research, building custom models, or are they a creative tool?

The Upcoming AI Landscape

The remainder of 2025 and all of 2026 will be spent peeling back the layers of this onion and gaining understanding as to where these companies overlap, how they differ, what they enable, and where they excel. Investors and adopters who start doing that work now will have a meaningful advantage over those waiting for someone else to draw the next Lumascape.

But even more importantly, winning is not limited to who you partner with. It’s about how you think. Is your organization the kind that defaults to building everything in-house and resists partnering, even when it slows you down? Or are you chasing every shiny new AI feature without ever committing to real integration or long-term transformation?

Building for the Future

Being AI-ready means structuring your teams and systems for delegation, not just automation. It means building flexible, composable architectures that allow agents, not just people, to plug into your workflows. It means enabling real-time intelligence, continuous feedback loops, and strategic adaptability. It means treating AI not as a tool, but as a collaborator.

We believe the way this industry works today will soon feel archaic. Fragmented platforms. Disconnected workflows. Dozens of dashboards just to get to a decision. Everyone trying to answer the same questions with different, incomplete data.

Agnitio’s Vision for the Future

We want to help the industry—and organizations across sectors—look back and say: “How did we ever work that way?” That’s the world we’re working toward at Agnitio. Not just in media and marketing, but in how we structure teams, make decisions, and unlock human potential across the board.

For us, AI isn’t just about speed or scale. It’s about returning people to the work they actually love: strategy, creativity, storytelling, human connection. What email did for responsiveness, what text did for access, agentic systems can do for clarity and flow. When done right, they give people back their time, their space to think, their ability to focus.

They make room for the art again.

The AI Storm is Here

The storm isn’t on the horizon. It’s already overhead. AI is reshaping the foundation in real time – quietly, quickly, perpetually. Some companies will stand because they rethought how they work, end to end. Others will scramble when the cracks start to show.

The real question isn’t if you’re using AI. It’s: What are you building on?

Ready to trade duct tape for real tools? Let’s talk.

Aubriana Lopez

Cofounder & COO, Agnitio