Smartly appointed Kelly Uphoff as Chief Technology Officer to lead its global engineering organization as the company expands its AI-native advertising technology platform.
Uphoff will oversee engineering as Smartly develops capabilities centered on continuous decision intelligence across the advertising campaign lifecycle.
The company is building toward a model in which AI systems continuously learn from campaign signals and use that information to improve subsequent decisions across creative development, media buying, optimization, and measurement.
Smartly said this approach is intended to help marketers respond more quickly to changing consumer behavior while improving the relevance and performance of advertising.
Uphoff brings experience spanning artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning, personalization, and large-scale technology infrastructure.
She previously held senior technology leadership roles at Netflix, where she led Data Science and Engineering teams working across machine learning, predictive modeling, and experimentation.
Her work at Netflix contributed to the systems supporting personalized experiences across the company’s global platform.
Most recently, Uphoff worked at Tala, where she led a transformation of the company’s technology platform.
At Tala, she focused on building infrastructure and systems designed to support secure and personalized financial products across international markets.
Smartly said Uphoff’s experience with AI-driven decision systems and global technology platforms will support the next phase of its product and engineering strategy.
The company is increasingly focused on combining data, artificial intelligence, media, and creative technology into a unified system capable of continuously optimizing advertising decisions.
Uphoff succeeds Lauri Tarkkala as CTO.
During Tarkkala’s tenure, Smartly rearchitected its technology foundation and advanced the development of its unified advertising platform.
The company also integrated acquisitions including Ad-Lib.io, Viralspace.ai, and INCRMNTAL.
Those acquisitions expanded Smartly’s capabilities across creative technology, AI, campaign decisioning, and measurement.
Smartly is positioning its platform for what it describes as the next phase of agentic advertising, where AI systems can increasingly make and execute decisions throughout the campaign process.
The company said its long-term goal is to create continuous optimization loops in which every advertising action generates additional intelligence that can improve future creative and media decisions.
KEY QUOTES:
“Advertising is entering a fundamentally new era, where AI and intelligent systems will reshape how brands understand and respond to consumers, make decisions and turn intelligence into action. Kelly understands that in an AI-native system, every signal is an opportunity to learn and make the next decision better. She brings the technical depth, AI expertise and customer orientation to help us accelerate the continuous optimization loops across creative and media, where every action generates intelligence that improves what comes next. That is how we create better experiences for people and better outcomes for marketers.”
Laura Desmond, CEO of Smartly
“The next chapter of advertising will require technology that can continuously learn, make better decisions and translate intelligence into experiences that are genuinely relevant to each consumer. Smartly has built a strong technology foundation and has a compelling opportunity to bring AI, data and decision-making together in ways that create meaningful value for marketers. I’m excited to join the team and help build what comes next to move advertising forward.”
Kelly Uphoff, Chief Technology Officer of Smartly
