TikTok used Advertising Week New York to unveil a set of AI advertising and commerce tools. The headline consumer feature is Shopping Assistant, a conversational shopping agent. But the change with the widest industry reach is that advertisers can now run TikTok campaigns from inside AI tools such as Claude and Snowflake.
TikTok says more than 200 million people in Europe use the platform. It cites a study it commissioned from Public First, which put the economic value generated by businesses advertising on TikTok across the EU at €31bn in 2025, a figure that counts direct, indirect and induced output. In Kantar’s Media Reactions 2026 report, marketers ranked TikTok first among platforms where they plan to increase ad spend in 2027.
“AI is transforming how advertiser content is created and scaled,” said David Kaufman, TikTok’s Global Head of Monetisation Product Partnerships.
“With our suite of solutions, we are bringing together AI, automation, and creativity to help advertisers improve performance while reducing effort. We are enabling advertisers to create work that feels relevant, move at the speed of culture, and drive meaningful business impact.”
Campaigns from inside AI assistants
TikTok for Business MCP, built on the open Model Context Protocol, lets developers build AI agents and tools that plan, launch and manage TikTok campaigns. TikTok lists it as a connector on Claude, Kimi, Manus, Perplexity, Replit, Snowflake, Tencent WorkBuddy and the IAB Tech Lab Agent Registry. A buyer working in a general-purpose assistant, or an analyst working in Snowflake, can set up and run a TikTok campaign without opening Ads Manager.
The MCP was launched at TikTok World in May, and an Agentic Hub marketplace of ready-made Skills built on it followed at the end of June, with HubSpot, Wix, Innovid and Kochava among the early developers. Google, Meta, Pinterest and Snap now offer MCP access of their own. TikTok says the number of advertisers using its MCP to activate and manage campaigns has risen by more than 200% since launch. It did not give a baseline.
Search, creative and shopping
Search Ads Campaign, powered by Smart+, brings TikTok’s automation to search, handling keywords, creative, bidding and budget across queries on the platform. TikTok frames this as capturing intent from users who search there for products and ideas, intent that advertisers currently pay Google to reach.
Smart+ Creative Selection pulls advertisers’ own assets, creative generated by TikTok’s Symphony tools and creator content into a single approval workflow, where advertisers decide what runs. GMV Max, the automated TikTok Shop ad product, will start factoring affiliate commissions, coupons and referral fees into its optimisation, so sellers can bid against return after costs.
Shopping Assistant sits across several TikTok touchpoints and gives real-time guidance on product details, shipping, sizing, availability and purchasing within one conversation.
Two further products announced in New York will not launch in Europe for now. Buy Direct is a one-click checkout that lets users buy from a brand without leaving the For You feed, built with partners including Salesforce, Shopify, Shoplazza and Stripe. Agentic Leads uses AI-guided conversations to capture and qualify prospects, both in TikTok direct messages and in lead forms on advertisers’ own sites. TikTok gave no European timetable for either.
