TIME Deploys Kana AI Agents for RFPs but Keeps Selling Human

By Tom Whitfield

TIME has deployed two AI agents from startup Kana — one that drafts ad proposals from incoming RFPs in minutes, another that recommends fixes for underdelivering campaigns — while its salespeople keep every client relationship. The move answers a question now pressing every premium publisher: if agents can do the coordination, what is left for sellers?

"A lot more selling," said Mark Howard, TIME's chief operating officer.

What changed inside TIME's sales process?

Before, an incoming RFP triggered days of manual coordination. A rep logged the details in Salesforce. Alerts fired over Slack. Product experts joined Google Meets to map inventory across a large product suite. Notes flew over email. The sales team stitched together a response across platforms.

"Premium media sales is still a highly personal, relationship-driven business," Howard said, "and sellers lose too much time playing coordinator."

To break that bottleneck, TIME turned to Kana, a startup founded by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya. The pair co-founded Krux, the data management platform Salesforce bought roughly a decade ago. In 2019 they launched super{set}, a VC firm that co-founds, builds and incubates data and AI startups. Its portfolio includes:

• Ketch, a privacy platform
• Habu, a data clean room provider LiveRamp bought for $200 million in 2024
• Rembrand, an AI-powered virtual product placement company that agreed last week to merge with content ad platform Whisper World

Kana came out of stealth in February with a $15 million seed round. Its agents take over the grunt work of the ad business.

How do the two agents work?

The sales agent reads RFPs and drafts proposals. It draws on what Vaidya calls a "knowledge graph" — a shared pool of context built from TIME's Salesforce CRM, order management system and ad server, both direct and programmatic.

It also pulls data from live campaigns, which is atypical for a pre-sales tool, Vaidya said. Normally that data belongs to ad ops after a deal closes, used to review performance rather than plan the next pitch. The Kana agent flips that.

"We do the research, we look at historical data and we look at similar advertisers," Vaidya said. "Then a salesperson can go in and start ideating on new proposals for advertisers that TIME hasn't even sold to yet."

The second agent works with ad ops. Dashboards already show when a campaign underdelivers or paces badly. They do not say what to do about it, Vaidya said. The agent recommends a fix — changing trafficking, pacing or budget — so a shortfall does not become a make-good.

Howard said TIME's revenue operations team uses the tool too, and he has seen "a significant increase in what they're able to accomplish in any given day or week." It also aids budget planning. "And not just for how we're going to finish this year and how Q1 looks, but actual 2027 modeling," Howard said. "It's a whole new world when you can have these kinds of insights delivered to you."

Will agents start closing the deals?

Between proposals and pacing, agents now cover most of a deal's life cycle. Nothing technically stops a publisher's agent from negotiating directly with an advertiser's agent while the rep takes a long lunch. Kana could build that, Vaidya said: put an MCP server — a standard for connecting agents to other software — in front of the proposal agent, and it could talk to advertiser agents tomorrow.

"That's a technology problem, which is easy to solve," he said.

TIME will not go there. Selling runs on relationships, Howard said, and agents doing the deal is "just not in our game plan." He compared it to the newsroom: "We don't do it with our journalism, and we're not going to do it with our sales." Then a caveat: "that isn't the plan for now."

For now, Kana's agents handle the coordination and TIME's sellers handle the clients.