TikTok has opened its global ad network to campaigns targeting the US and unveiled a set of agentic AI tools for brands.
The ByteDance-owned platform announced the products at Advertising Week New York 2026 on Monday (October 5).
TikTok paired the announcements with data from Kantar, whose annual Media Reactions report named TikTok the #1 platform where marketers plan to increase ad spend in 2027.
According to TikTok‘s summary of the report, this is the fifth consecutive year that Kantar has given the platform that ranking, and 84% of marketers currently place advertising on TikTok.
The 2026 study drew on more than 23,000 consumers across 33 markets, plus more than 800 interviews with senior marketers.
It also found that a net 75% of marketers plan to increase spending on AI assistants in 2027, the fastest-growing budget line in the study.
“AI is transforming how advertiser content is created and scaled,” said David Kaufman, Global Head of Monetization Product Partnerships at TikTok. “With our suite of solutions, we [are] bringing together AI, automation, and creativity to help advertisers improve performance while reducing effort.”
“With our suite of solutions, we [are] bringing together AI, automation, and creativity to help advertisers improve performance while reducing effort.”
David Kaufman, TikTok
“We are enabling advertisers to create work that feels relevant, move at the speed of culture, and drive meaningful business impact,” Kaufman added.
The ad network, called TikTok Ad Network (TTAN), lets advertisers extend their TikTok campaigns to third-party apps.
TTAN, formerly known as Pangle, is now generally available for campaigns targeting the US, its 48th market, according to a TikTok blog post.
TikTok says the network reaches nearly 400,000 apps worldwide and more than 1 billion daily active users.
Half of TTAN’s users are not on TikTok, according to the company, which puts that incremental audience at 95 million. TikTok’s source notes cite US-only internal measurement for that figure, while its headline reach numbers (nearly 400,000 apps and more than 1 billion daily active users) are global.
Because TTAN is integrated into TikTok Ads Manager, advertisers can run existing campaigns on the network without setting up new ones.
In early testing, campaigns using automatic placement, which includes the network, delivered a 65% improvement in cost per acquisition and a 63% improvement in return on ad spend compared with single-placement campaigns, TikTok claims, citing an April 2024 internal test across Pangle’s markets.
“TikTok Ad Network helped us extend what was already working on TikTok to reach more of the audiences we needed at scale,” said Danica Xu, Head of Growth Marketing at Roblox. “We were able to build on existing performance learnings and creative assets while driving incremental reach as Roblox expanded its investment.”
On the AI side, TikTok is building what it calls “Agentic Commerce” shopping experiences, starting with Buy Direct and Shopping Assistant.
Buy Direct is an in-app checkout that lets users buy from a brand without leaving TikTok, including with one click from the For You feed.
Shopping Assistant is a conversational AI agent that answers questions on product details, shipping, sizing, and availability within a single chat.
TikTok says it is building both with commerce and payments partners including Salesforce, Shopify, Shoplazza, and Stripe.
It also introduced Agentic Leads, an AI agent for lead generation that will be available in TikTok direct messages and in lead forms on advertisers’ own websites.
TikTok is making the agentic tools available through eligibility-based testing.
Separately, TikTok said its TikTok for Business Model Context Protocol (MCP), which lets developers build AI agents to plan, launch, and manage ad campaigns, is now available as a connector on several AI platforms.
They include Claude, Kimi, Manus, Perplexity, Replit, Snowflake, and Tencent WorkBuddy, as well as the IAB Tech Lab Agent Registry.
TikTok introduced the MCP at its TikTok World product summit in May.
Since launch, the number of advertisers using the MCP for campaign activation and management has grown by more than 200%, TikTok says, citing internal data for July to September.
“The TikTok MCP is indispensable to our AI-powered campaign workflows including how we build campaigns, upload creative, and analyze performance,” said George Velonias, Head of Growth Marketing at Wayfair Canada. “TikTok is a leader in helping brands leverage AI to grow.”
TikTok is bringing Smart+, its AI-powered campaign tool, to search ads, letting advertisers automate search campaigns across keywords and creative.
A new Smart+ Creative Selection feature pulls advertisers’ own assets, creator content, and AI-generated creative from TikTok’s Symphony tools into a single approval workflow.
TikTok is also expanding GMV Max, its automated ad product for TikTok Shop sellers, which will further factor in costs such as affiliate commissions, coupons, and referral fees.
The update builds on profit-focused features TikTok first announced at TikTok World.
TikTok‘s Buy Direct requires an integration with the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
Google launched UCP in January as an open standard for agentic commerce, co-developed with companies including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart.
At its Google Marketing Live event on May 20, the company extended UCP checkout into ad inventory for the first time, letting shoppers buy directly inside YouTube Shopping ads run by brands that have integrated UCP.
Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent that can complete purchases on a user’s behalf, in the US on September 8, initially using Stripe‘s Link wallet for checkout.
Amazon began blocking Muse from its retail site on September 20, after Meta declined a request to exclude Amazon’s store from the agent, according to Bloomberg.
On May 13, Amazon folded its Rufus assistant into Alexa for Shopping, whose Buy for Me feature can complete eligible purchases from other online stores on a customer’s behalf.
OpenAI, which introduced Instant Checkout in ChatGPT in September 2025, has shifted its focus to product discovery.
“We’ve found that the initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide, so we’re allowing merchants to use their own checkout experiences while we focus our efforts on product discovery,” OpenAI said in a blog post on March 24.
The US rollout of TTAN follows the establishment in January of TikTok USDS Joint Venture, the majority American-owned entity that secures TikTok’s US user data, apps, and algorithm.
Under that structure, TikTok‘s global business, through its US entities, manages “certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing,” according to the joint venture’s announcement.
Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX each hold 15% of the joint venture, while ByteDance retains 19.9%.
ByteDance signed binding agreements for the deal in December 2025.
At the time, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told staff in a memo: “Advertisers will continue to connect with global audiences with no impact,” according to Business Insider.
On May 22, Universal Music Group and TikTok struck a new multi-year global licensing deal.
The companies said that agreement would give UMG‘s artists and songwriters access to expanded marketing and advertising campaigns on TikTok, as well as ecommerce tools.
TikTok‘s ad targeting has also drawn regulatory action.
In July, South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission fined TikTok KRW 10.3 billion (USD $7 million).
The regulator found that TikTok had gathered users’ activity from other companies’ apps and websites without a lawful basis, and used that data to target ads.
TikTok, which does not report standalone financial results, generated an estimated USD $23 billion in revenue in 2024, around 77% of it from advertising, according to Business of Apps.
Parent company ByteDance generated revenue of USD $155 billion in 2024, Bloomberg has reported.
ByteDance was valued at USD $480 billion in a share auction in November 2025.Music Business Worldwide
