Andrea Tortella, CEO and co-founder of Thrad, took the stage at WSJ Tech Live in Doha, Qatar, one of the flagship technology conferences organized by The Wall Street Journal, to speak about the future of advertising in the age of artificial intelligence.

At the event, Tortella outlined Thrad’s thesis: that the shift from search-based to conversation-based discovery represents the most significant structural change in digital advertising since the rise of programmatic. As users move from typing queries into search engines to having open-ended conversations with AI assistants, the traditional advertising playbook — built around keywords, clicks, and cookies — no longer maps to the new user behavior.

Tortella presented Thrad’s approach to sponsored intelligence: placing relevant brand content natively inside AI responses, at the moment a user expresses intent through a prompt. The model, he argued, is inherently more contextual and less interruptive than display or search advertising, and better aligned with the way users actually interact with AI.

WSJ Tech Live brings together founders, executives, and investors shaping the global technology industry. Thrad’s inclusion on the program signals the growing mainstream attention around AI-native advertising infrastructure and the commercial models emerging around large language models.