French ad tech and AI: who does what in 2026

Since 29 July 2026, Criteo has been a company incorporated under Luxembourg law. The "French ad tech" label now covers increasingly different situations, and the word "AI" even more so. For an advertiser, two questions matter more than the country on the logo: which data the model uses, and on whose behalf it optimises.

Criteo's shareholders approved the transfer on 27 February. Since 29 July, its ordinary shares have traded directly on Nasdaq, and its board of directors has approved a second step: a merger into a US subsidiary, subject to a shareholder vote and expected in January 2027, which would come with the transfer of its listing from Nasdaq to the NYSE. Long presented as the emblem of French ad tech, Criteo is therefore already no longer one in the legal sense, and is expected to be domiciled in the United States in 2027.

It is not an isolated case. In February 2025, Outbrain bought Teads, born in France and owned by Altice since 2017, then took its name: the listed company, Teads Holding Co., is headquartered in New York. The French software vendor AT Internet has belonged since 2021 to Piano, which moved its global headquarters to Amsterdam in 2022, while stating that Piano Analytics was built entirely in France. The Paris-based DSP Hawk has belonged to the Dutch group Azerion since 2023, AdCreative.ai to Appier since March 2025, and in September Mistral AI confirmed to AFP that it would buy Pimento.

We selected companies founded or based in France that publicly document the use of AI in a product sold to advertisers, agencies or publishers, and we state their current status. Each claim links to a dated source at the bottom of the page. The performance figures these companies publish are their own, measured with their own methods: we do not repeat them.

The landscape in one table

Company	Position in the chain	Publicly documented AI	Status in October 2026
Criteo	Buy side (retargeting, retail media)	Targeting and product recommendation, MCP server, OpenAI advertising pilot	Luxembourg company, US move planned
Teads	Buy and sell side (video, CTV)	Predictive engine, EngageOS for publishers	Teads Holding Co., headquartered in New York
Ogury	Buy side (persona targeting)	Personas, Mistral 7B via Amazon Bedrock, SONA agent	Founded in 2014, headquartered in London, described as French by the press
Equativ	Sell side (ad server, SSP, curation)	Media planning agent, MCP server	Headquartered in Paris and New York, Bridgepoint majority
Weborama	Data and contextual targeting	Semantic AI, Webomind	French company
mediarithmics	Data (CDP)	Announced agentic capabilities	Headquartered in Paris
Mirakl Ads	Retail media	Automated campaigns, Business Agents	Mirakl, headquarters in Paris and Boston
Unlimitail	Retail media	Creative Studio, Social Retail audiences	Joint venture launched by Carrefour and Publicis in 2023
Eulerian	Measurement and attribution	LEO agent, MCP connection	Describes itself as independent and sovereign
Commanders Act	Data collection and activation	AI-based recommendations (Adloop)	Headquartered in Paris
Arcads.ai	Generative creative	Video ads with AI avatars	French start-up, €14M raised in 2025

Criteo, Teads and Ogury on the buy side

Criteo sells advertisers retargeting, retail media and Commerce Max, presented as retail media on the open internet. Its homepage promises "advanced AI that thinks like a shopper". The phrase stays general; the 2026 announcements say more. In March, Criteo described itself as the first ad tech partner integrated into OpenAI's advertising pilot in the Free and Go versions of ChatGPT in the United States. In May, dentsu France and Criteo announced a video campaign run end to end by an AI agent: the trading agent of the dentsu.Connect platform, connected to Criteo's MCP server (the Model Context Protocol, which lets an AI assistant query third-party software and trigger actions in it), turned a brief of a few sentences into actions in Criteo, from audience definition to campaign activation, without going through Criteo's interface.

Teads describes a predictive AI engine that draws on consumer engagement to optimise business outcomes across screens. It is a general description; Teads' 2026 news is mostly on the publisher side (see below).

Ogury built its offer on a different choice: targeting personas, groups defined by interests or purchase intent, rather than individual identifiers. A post published by AWS in May 2025 details its use of the Mistral 7B model, through Amazon Bedrock, to match agency briefs with available personas. In June 2026 Ogury launched SONA, a conversational planning and activation tool which, according to the trade press, can be used from Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT.

These three companies sell media. Their AI decides where and to whom your ads are shown, on inventory they buy or resell. The results they report are measured by them: a ROAS shown by Criteo is a ROAS attributed by Criteo, with the limits we set out in our article on ROAS.

When AI works for the seller

Equativ, formerly Smart AdServer, is a sell-side platform: ad server, SSP and curation offer. The company, whose principal investor has been Bridgepoint since 2023, acquired Sharethrough in 2024, which has operated under the Equativ brand since June 2025. In December 2025 it launched a media planning agent inside its Maestro platform, it publishes an MCP server, and in May 2026 it announced with Chalice AI curation models running within the IAB Tech Lab's ARTF framework.

In June, Teads launched EngageOS, which it describes as an AI-driven operating system to maximise publisher revenue; a partnership with Magnite lets publishers bring the demand from their own SSP into it.

A buyer should keep in mind that a sell-side platform's AI first optimises the revenue of the inventory it sells. AI curation can improve the quality of what you buy; it also adds an intermediary that selects the inventory and takes a fee on the transaction. Before buying a curated deal, we ask who pays for the curation, on what basis, and by which criterion the inventory was selected.

Data, context and semantics

Weborama highlights a proprietary semantic AI behind Webo Intent, its intent-based audience platform. Its Webomind tool, launched in 2024, adds generative AI to the writing of contextual targeting queries.

mediarithmics, a Paris-based CDP vendor for media owners and retailers, shows a frequent gap between announcement and product. In January 2026 the trade press reported that Channel 4 would adopt its CDP "as well as future agentic AI capabilities" (our translation), including audience creation in natural language. The word "future" matters: at the time, these features were announced, not delivered.

AntVoice presents its Hybrid Pulse offer as the first programmatic AI to combine third-party cookies and cookieless signals. That "first" is the company's own claim.

Retail media and till data

Retail media accounts for a large share of recent announcements. Mirakl, which has headquarters in Paris and Boston, presents Mirakl Ads as an AI retail media solution: its automated campaigns choose products, targets and bids. In December 2024 the group bought the German company Adspert, which described its AI as highly predictive, and in June 2026 it launched Business Agents, a conversational assistant built into the platform.

Unlimitail, the joint venture launched in 2023 by Carrefour and Publicis, presented a Creative Studio for generating ad creatives in February. According to Unlimitail, this Creative Studio is trained on thousands of creatives produced and analysed by the ad network over the course of campaigns run for major advertisers. In April, Unlimitail presented its Social Retail offer as combining transactional data and AI to identify the profiles with the highest purchase probability.

This is the difference with general ad platforms: a retailer's models rely on purchases recorded at the till or on its website, whereas Google and Meta depend on the conversions the advertiser sends them. The sales that the retailer's ad network reports to you are nonetheless attributed by it, under its own rules: that does not remove the need to test incrementality, since a customer who buys after seeing a sponsored product would sometimes have bought anyway.

Measurement: sovereignty has its limits

Eulerian describes itself as fully sovereign, French and independent. It offers LEO, an analysis and activation agent, and an MCP connection that links ChatGPT or Claude to its data. The two arguments sit uneasily together: the sovereignty of the measurement tool does not extend to the assistant plugged into it. An advertiser who chose Eulerian for sovereignty reasons should decide explicitly whether to let an assistant published in the United States read its data.

Commanders Act, a Paris-based vendor known for its tag manager, bought Adloop in 2023 and offers AI-based recommendations to improve platform bidding strategies. Piano, mentioned above, has added a generative AI analysis assistant and is testing an MCP server for Piano Analytics in private beta.

Addingwell, the Lille-based server-side tagging platform bought by Didomi in 2025, does not sell AI. Its site nonetheless makes the point that matters most for paid media: "Your AI is only as good as the data you feed it", since Performance Max or Advantage+ adjust bids and audiences based on the conversion signals they receive. We share that view: before buying an extra AI layer from a third party, we would check the quality of the conversion data sent to Google and Meta, on which their bidding strategies directly depend.

Generative creative changes hands fast

Three young French companies show how fast this market moves. The French start-up AdCreative.ai was bought by Appier in March 2025. Arcads.ai, created in 2023, generates video ads with AI avatars and raised €14 million in December 2025 in a round led by Eurazeo. Pimento, founded in 2022 to create advertising campaigns with AI, is to be bought by Mistral AI, which confirmed it to AFP; its teams will join those of Vibe, Mistral's conversational assistant, formerly Le Chat.

A creative tool can therefore change shareholder, then priorities, within a few months. Before handing it your brand guidelines, product visuals or briefs, read what happens to that data in the event of an acquisition.

Everyone plugs in an MCP server

Criteo, Equativ, Ogury, Eulerian and Piano all open their tools to conversational assistants through an MCP server, available or in beta. The protocol gives common access to data that remains each vendor's own. An assistant connected to both Criteo and Eulerian will receive two different attributions of the same sale, the ad platform's and the measurement tool's, and nothing in the protocol reconciles them. It is up to you to decide, before connecting the assistant, which one serves as the reference for steering.

Before signing with one of them

The country of origin says almost nothing about what a vendor's AI does. For a tender, we would ask these questions instead:

• Where are the legal seat and data hosting? If sovereignty is in your requirements, Criteo, Teads and AT Internet show that a French origin is not enough.
• Which side of the transaction does the model work for: your buying cost or the publisher's revenue?
• Which data does the model rely on: yours, the vendor's, a retailer's?
• Is the feature available on your account today, or only announced?
• Will the vendor accept a test with a control group to measure what its AI really adds?
• What does the contract say in case of a change of ownership?

If a vendor can clearly answer only half of these questions, we recommend starting with a test limited in time and budget, with a success criterion measured outside its platform.

Information checked on 13 October 2026 against the sources listed at the bottom of the page.