Listen to this on-demand webinar where we hosted Supersonic's Creative Growth Director, Keren Levy Atias ,for an interesting chat about which skills UA people need to adopt and acquire as we move forward in the AI driven UA era. 

Here’s what we talked about in a nutshell. 

The Big Picture

The UA job looks nothing like it did five years ago. Back then, you had control. Bid optimizations. Audience targeting. Campaign structures you could actually touch.

That world is gone.

AppLovin changed everything. SDK networks became black boxes. You pick a country, set an economic goal, upload creatives. The algorithm does the rest.

What's left for UA teams? Creatives. That's the lever you still control. And the best teams know it.

What Changed

Manual work is shrinking. Networks are taking over the mix-and-match optimization that used to eat your days. Video one with end card two versus video one with end card three? The algorithm handles that now.

Audience targeting shifted upstream. You lost data access. The targeting that works now happens through creative strategy. Emotions. Motivations. The playable that makes someone feel something, have fun, and engage deeply get the most share of spend.

Platform differences still exist, but they're blurring. UGC crushes on social. Playables dominate SDK networks. But TikTok is starting to scale playables. The lines are getting fuzzy.

AI Exposed the Truth

AI exposed who was already thinking deeply. Great creative teams didn’t suddenly appear.

There's a flood of "AI slop" hitting the networks. Thousands of videos that don't tell stories. Frankenstein concepts with no hypothesis behind them. Templates copied from competitors with a color swap.

The teams winning are the ones using AI to lower the cost of testing ideas. Not to replace ideas.

Karen's example: A trash tycoon game. The team wanted to tell a story about pollution and environmental harm. Two years ago? That pitch dies in production. Too expensive. Too risky. With AI? Half a day. The hook boosted performance 30% on a notoriously hard genre.

AI is an accelerator. Not a replacement for taste.

The Skills That Matter Now

1. Creativity with emotional intelligence. Algorithms optimize delivery. They don't understand what makes someone feel something. You do.
2. System thinking. Explore the entire space of possibilities systematically. Which audiences have affinity for your game? Which geos are underserved? Build a system that learns from performance data and informs the next round of ideation.
3. Game design literacy. Playables are everywhere. The concept might be right, but if the playable isn't fun, players drop. Tutorials break. Loops don't engage. You need enough taste in level design to know what's working and what's not.
4. AI literacy. Know what to delegate and what to keep. AI doesn't have taste. If you ask it to generate something that requires taste, you'll get disappointed. Keep the judgment. Delegate the production.

Action Items

This week: If you're not using any AI tool, pick one. Start exploring. Make mistakes. Learn what it's good at.

Q1 2026: Build structure around your creative testing. Don't produce 100 creatives with no hypothesis. Know your audience, their motivations, their emotions. Use AI to accelerate production. Keep taste for yourself.

Longer term: Level up your AI literacy. Anthropic has free courses on YouTube. Learn what AI can and can't do. The gap between what AI is capable of and what most people understand is massive. Close that gap.

The Bottom Line

The UA teams winning in 2026 are the ones treating AI as a way to lower the cost of  testing ideas, not a magic button. They're thinking in systems with clear inputs and outputs. They're investing in creative strategy. They're keeping taste for themselves.

Algorithms will keep getting smarter. The question is whether you'll know how to work with them.