X is rebuilding its ad platform from scratch, and AI is doing the heavy lifting

Elon Musk’s X is still trying to get advertisers back on its side — and this time it’s betting on a full platform rebuild with AI at the center. The new system started rolling out Thursday.

X’s ad business has been a mess since Musk took over. Revenue tanked, brands fled, and the company scrambled to find other ways to make money, like subscriptions and AI services. But according to eMarketer, things have been slowly turning around. They estimate X pulled in $2.26 billion in ad revenue in 2025, and that’s expected to climb to $2.46 billion in 2026. For context, that’s still about half of what Twitter made in 2021, but at least the line is going up again.

Now X wants to accelerate that recovery with a fresh ad stack. The company says it’s doing a “phased rollout” of a platform with modern “retrieval and ranking systems” powered by AI. The pitch to marketers: easier campaign creation, better control, and AI that actually improves results by placing ads where they’ll perform best.

Monique Pintarelli, head of global advertising at xAI, posted a statement on X that sounded exactly like something you’d hear from a Musk-run company: “Very few companies would have the ambition and technical courage to completely rebuild their entire advertising platform in such a short timeframe. This is classic X and xAI — bold, fast, and focused on building something substantially better for advertisers.”

She also promised smoother integration of ongoing innovations and a steady stream of new features. We’ll see if that holds up.

It’s not surprising that rebuilding the ad platform became a priority after X merged with xAI last year. AI has been fueling ad revenue growth across the industry — Google, Meta, and others have been riding what The New York Times called a “digital ad boom.” AI automates everything from ad creation to targeting to measurement, and it’s also lowered the barrier for smaller businesses that can now access tools once reserved for big spenders.

X is late to this party, but at least they’re showing up. Whether the new platform can actually win back the brands that fled during Musk’s early chaos remains to be seen. The tech might be solid, but trust takes longer to rebuild than code.