TIME Uses Kana AI Agents for Proposals and Live Campaign Ops

By Sophie Lindqvist

TIME is using two Kana AI agents for advertising proposals and live campaigns, and Kana emerged from stealth in February with a $15 million seed round. The deployment covers pre-sales work and campaign monitoring, while TIME keeps advertiser relationships with human sellers.

The case for automation starts with speed. An agent could turn an advertiser request for proposal into a proposal in minutes, although TIME has not disclosed measured turnaround times.

Before deployment, each advertiser request for proposal (RFP) triggered a chain of hand-offs with little direct selling. A representative logged the request in Salesforce, Slack alerts fired, product experts joined Google Meet calls to map inventory across a large product suite, and email carried more notes. Sales staff then spent days coordinating several platforms to assemble the response.

TIME chief operating officer Mark Howard said: “Premium media sales is still a highly personal, relationship-driven business,” adding that sellers lost too much time playing coordinator. The old process consumed sales time on coordination instead of buyer conversations.

Kana was founded by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, serial ad-tech entrepreneurs who previously co-founded Krux, a data management platform that Salesforce bought roughly a decade earlier. In 2019, they launched super{set}, a nontraditional venture-capital firm that co-founds, builds and incubates data and AI startups.

The firm's portfolio includes privacy platform Ketch, data clean-room provider Habu, which LiveRamp bought for $200 million in 2024, and Rembrand, an AI-powered virtual product-placement company. Rembrand agreed to merge with content advertising platform Whisper World in the previous week.

What does this change for TIME’s ad teams?

The sales agent works beside TIME’s sales team, reading each RFP and drafting a proposal. It builds what Kana calls a “knowledge graph,” a shared pool of context drawn from Salesforce’s CRM, the order management system, and the ad server for direct and programmatic sales.

The agent also brings live campaign data into pre-sales work, which Vaidya called atypical. Such information usually belongs to ad operations after a sale closes, where staff review how previous campaigns performed. The sales agent can proactively turn it into raw material for the next pitch.

Kana co-founder Vaidya said: “We do the research, we look at historical data and we look at similar advertisers.” The agent then supplies material for proposals aimed at advertisers TIME has not yet sold to, leaving the salesperson to develop the pitch.

Human sellers keep control of the relationship. TIME does not plan to turn that relationship into a software-led process, and Howard said the publisher would not do that with journalism either. He added that the sales position reflects the plan for now, not a permanent rule.

Where the operations agent takes over

After a deal closes, Kana’s second agent works with ad operations, watching campaigns that start to fall behind. Existing dashboards can flag campaigns delivering less than planned or failing to pace correctly, but they do not recommend a response.

The agent recommends changes to trafficking, pacing or budget when a campaign falls behind. The aim is to stop a shortfall from becoming a make-good. TIME’s revenue operations team also uses the same tool for budget planning.

Howard reported a significant increase in what the team can accomplish in a day or week. The system supports plans for finishing the current year, the outlook for Q1, and actual 2027 modeling.

Why TIME will not hand selling to agents

Between proposals and campaign pacing, the two agents now cover most of a deal’s life cycle. Vaidya said Kana could put an MCP server, a standard way for AI agents to connect to other software, in front of the proposal agent. The setup could let it communicate with an advertiser’s agents, potentially tomorrow, while a salesperson attended a client lunch.

He called that a technology problem and said it would be easy to solve. TIME does not plan to use that route. Howard said agent-to-agent selling falls outside the publisher’s plan because selling still depends on relationships; the salesperson owns the conversation.

Neither TIME nor Kana disclosed deployment pricing or contract terms. The available figures therefore cover outside funding and an earlier acquisition, not TIME’s operating cost.

For TIME, the practical change is clear: agents handle research, proposal drafting, campaign monitoring and optimization recommendations, while human sellers retain persuasion and negotiation. TIME has adopted tools for internal work, not autonomous buying.