Warner Bros. Discovery, a global media and entertainment company with content distributed across more than 220 countries and territories through brands including HBO, CNN, Discovery Channel, DC and Warner Bros. film and television studios, has announced it is rebuilding its advertising technology infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of Amazon and WBD's designated preferred cloud provider. The project centers on deploying agentic AI to automate and connect advertising workflows that previously operated across separate linear and digital business units.
The core architectural change is the consolidation of WBD's US linear and digital advertising operations onto a single platform, replacing manual internal workflows with automated, data-driven processes. Autonomous AI agents handle planning, dynamic forecasting, real-time optimization and closed-loop measurement, with the system designed to learn from campaign outcomes and adjust continuously. The platform supports flexible targeting, allowing buyers to focus on specific brands or audience segments across linear and digital channels, with WBD's system generating inventory allocation recommendations.
WBD began rolling out the first set of capabilities in 2026, covering agentic automation for direct response and commercial workflows, advanced audience forecasting, and enhanced measurement and attribution. Unified media planning is scheduled for Q3 2026, followed by a phased rollout of composable order management, pricing and stewardship in Q4.
The platform runs on several AWS infrastructure layers. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore provides the environment for building, connecting and running AI agents. Amazon Bedrock hosts the foundation models WBD deploys in its closed instance. Amazon SageMaker handles training of custom machine learning models within WBD's own data protection and security controls. Amazon S3 stores data in Apache Iceberg format for the underlying data lake, and Amazon Elastic Container Service powers application hosting. A separate component called Amazon Quick gives WBD's advertising sales teams a natural language interface to query data, surface insights and receive recommendations without writing queries.
Dr. Nage Sethu, SVP, Technology for Converged Advertising and Linear Systems at Warner Bros. Discovery, described what the platform is meant to deliver for advertisers: "We're embarking on the next frontier of advertising where convergence brings linear and digital together on a single platform — each retaining its own essence, yet with the fluidity to plan, package, and optimize across both — all measurable and optimizable at cloud scale with agentic, AI-native decisioning. Building with AWS has been critical to streamlining the buyer's experience across linear and digital, powering critical layers of our data, forecasting, and next-generation agentic advertising stack."
Samira Panah Bakhtiar, General Manager for Media, Entertainment, Games and Sports at Amazon Web Services, described the commercial rationale behind the collaboration: "AWS is proud to deepen our relationship with Warner Bros. Discovery at such a transformative moment in media and advertising. By combining WBD's iconic content portfolio and rich audience signals with AWS's cloud and agentic AI capabilities, we're enabling a new era of intelligent, automated advertising that delivers better outcomes for brands and viewers alike."
