Omneky is an agentic advertising platform built on a thesis Hikari Senju has been executing against since 2017 — that generative and agentic AI would eventually automate the full creative and campaign management workflow of advertising agencies. In this return episode of BUILDERS, Hikari sits back down three years after his first appearance to examine how the platform has evolved from an early AI creative tool into a fully autonomous end-to-end advertising system, and what the arrival of truly capable agentic AI means for how businesses compete for attention.
Topics discussed
- •Why Omneky was architected from day one to compete directly with Omnicom and Publicis.
- •How Omneky Agent delivers fully autonomous campaign generation, launch, and weekly optimization with no human input.
- •Why AI image and video generation has now crossed the uncanny valley — and what that practically unlocks at scale.
- •How SMB and enterprise customers share more core product needs than their size difference suggests.
- •Why Omneky’s SMB product accelerates enterprise product quality and functions as top-of-funnel for enterprise deals.
- •How improving ad attribution is pulling advertising spend away from sales budgets across the market.
- •Why AI-generated creative should be benchmarked against the bad creative it replaces, not against best-in-class human work.
GTM lessons for B2B founders
- •Build against a thesis before the market exists, then hold position. Hikari began ideating Omneky in 2017 and started building in 2018 — before the generative AI infrastructure to execute the vision existed. The company name and logo were chosen to signal competitive intent against Omnicom and Publicis from the start, so when the technology finally arrived, Omneky was already in pole position. Define the end state, build toward it publicly, and let the market catch up to the thesis.
- •Deploy SMBs as your highest-velocity product testing environment. As Hikari puts it, “there’s no more critical product person than a small business that’s spending their meager capital on your product.” SMBs have zero tolerance for product failure and produce faster, more honest feedback loops than enterprise pilots mediated by procurement and customer success layers.
- •Design your SMB and enterprise motions to feed each other, not compete. Omneky’s SMB product improves through constant pressure, which directly raises the quality enterprise customers receive — and the SMB motion builds brand familiarity that de-risks the enterprise buying decision. The SMB base is a product development engine and an awareness channel that rolls upward into enterprise conversion.
Listen to the full episode on BUILDERS via Apple Podcasts.