But with the upcoming U.S. elections, Musk’s free-speech agenda adds to the platform’s volatility, sources said.

“There’s going be a lot of [political] content on X,” said Shamsul Chowdhury, executive vice president of paid social at Jellyfish. “How does X manage that and make brands feel safe to be in that space?”

X had not responded to comments by press time.

Using a chatbot to streamline ad targeting

Details of X’s AI-powered ad targeting capabilities are scant.

Other platforms have been offering some type of AI-ad targeting for years, with Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ ratcheting up the most recent headlines for being effective but also not entirely transparent.

In the past month, the first agency executive was shown a preview of an AI targeting tool from X that had a similar interface to ChatGPT. Buyers can type in their target audience—for instance, people who enjoy running or are in running clubs.

“The current status quo is that you manually toggle targeting options like demographics or psychographic behavior,” the first agency executive said. “[The AI tool] is trying to make that streamlined.”

However, because not much active spending is happening on the platform through this agency, it has yet to test the tool on a live campaign.

This exec also noted that X lacks the performance-driven tools available on rival platforms such as Meta, TikTok and Snap.

“There’s no shortage of platforms for advertisers to spend their ad dollars,” said Chowdhury. “How does X make a claim for the budget when they don’t necessarily have the ad products that are competitive to their peer set?”