By Ronan Shields  •  December 3, 2025  •

That transition comes amid a turbulent backdrop: over the last several years, its share price and market cap have fluctuated amid speculation over “signal-loss,” albeit Google’s U-turn on its earlier plans for Chrome augured well in Komasinski’s time in office, not to mention the disruptive emergence of AI. 

In response, Criteo has attempted to rebrand itself from a heavy-hitting retargeting outfit to a commerce media platform that’s now experimenting with LLMs, publishers, and retailers alike to hone monetization in the AI-first era. Komasinski sat down with Digiday to discuss these efforts on the sidelines of a recent press event, explaining his strategy as he approaches his one-year anniversary in office. 

The conversation below has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Criteo has spoken much of its vision for using AI to expand its services – use cases include agentic commerce and audience activation – how does this shift your model? Are you talking about moving to a SaaS model with advertisers?

I think there are two tracks in terms of how it changes things. The first is the self-service… we will launch Commerce Go as a self-service tool by the end of Q1 next year. That means an advertiser can go online, put in their credit card information, and have campaigns up and running in 10 minutes. 

It is competitive with some of the self-service tools from Meta with Advantage+ or from Google with Performance Max –the differentiation versus those platforms is that it’s cross-channel. Criteo has always had a healthy amount of managed service that was required to drive the platform, and I see that changing quite a bit over the next couple of years.

The second track around agentic with retail, that really is an extension of what we do today — the ability to power sponsored ads or improved relevancy for a retailer — that’s just an extension of capabilities that we serve on product detail pages currently.  

Nothing to disclose on revenue models or forecasts yet, but it is exciting. One of the reasons it is exciting is that it leverages existing infrastructure, so we don’t have to reinvent the way crawling monetization is resolved. It’s using the RTB pipes that the BidSwitch is built on, and for mid-to-longtail publishers, which is a segment that’s like really underserved in the LLM free-for-all that’s going on. 

So, we’re encouraged by the pilot with RTB, and looking to find other publishing partners to do further testing with, then we’ll start to refine that monetization model, and hopefully that will turn out to be a viable product for mid-to-longtail publishers and us.

Could you address the ongoing speculation about Criteo’s corporate structure and any potential sale? After the recent redomiciling from France to Luxembourg, can you clarify the rationale behind the move?

When you’re a publicly traded company, right, you are always looking for ways to maximize value for shareholders.  But no, we’re not in a process of any kind today; the redomiciling of the parent-level entity is really designed to improve our ability to attract passive capital to our shares and to improve trading liquidity. It doesn’t really change the operations of the business. Our tech team is still based in Paris, as are many of our back office functions, and we don’t see any changes to that. So it should help the stock become more easily included in passive indices like ETFs, which should be good for our shareholders.

Is there any substance to the ongoing speculation that there may be a divestiture of some of the assets that Criteo assumed over, say, the last decade or so, particularly IPONWEB?

I don’t have anything firm to say on that, other than, again, as a publicly traded company, you always have a responsibility to look at your portfolio of assets and to make sure that everything’s a good fit for the strategy that you’re pursuing.

As we continue to make progress with the whole set, commerce media is the north star, and all of the different segments are laddering up to that pretty well, but it is a responsible thing to always be looking at your portfolio.

We are excited about it, but I think the reason we don’t talk more about it is that the test isn’t complete yet. There’s testing that’s happening over the course of this month, so we don’t want to get ahead of that, although I’m pretty confident that the test results will be positive. 

When you’re dealing with a third party that you’re dependent on, it’s not about what you think; it’s about what they want to do, but I think the results show an uplift in relevancy.  

It’s up to them as to what they want to do with that. Is that something they want to pay for, or is that something that shapes how they think about native ad units powered by intelligence? [That’s up to them].