Rewriting the Rules of Programmatic: Adam Heimlich on Agentic Bidding, ARTF, and Building Chalice AI

Programmatic advertising has spent the last 15 years optimizing for one thing: speed.

But somewhere along the way, we lost something more important—control, transparency, and true decisioning intelligence.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, we sit down with Adam Heimlich, Founder & CEO of Chalice AI, to unpack what happens when an operator who spent decades inside the system decides to rebuild it from the ground up.

Adam’s perspective is different. He’s not theorizing about programmatic—he ran it. He understands the incentives, the inefficiencies, and the architectural limitations of RTB and DSP-driven buying. And now he’s building a new model.

We cover:

• Why RTB infrastructure is fundamentally constrained by legacy “pipes”- How Chalice is using containerized decisioning to move logic closer to the bidstream- What the Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF) actually is—and why it matters
• Why AI agents may reshape how media decisions are made (and who controls them)
• The shift from platform-centric buying → modular, agent-driven ecosystems- Why data is commoditized—but modeling and service are not
• The real implications of agentic trading and AI-native marketplaces

We also go beyond the tech:

• Adam’s transition from agency operator to founder- Building Chalice alongside his partner Ali Manning
• The reality of startup life vs. the mythology
• And yes… the philosophy behind AdTech shitposting

This is a conversation about more than bidding mechanics. It’s about whether the entire architecture of digital advertising is about to change—and who wins if it does.If you care about where programmatic is actually heading—not just what vendors are selling—this one is worth your time.

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