By Mic Wilborn
— November 24th, 2025
The buzziest of buzz terminology these days is undoubtedly artificial intelligence, with AI now all over digital signage technology marketing.
Abruptly, it seems, digital signage is AI-powered.
But is it?
While many to most software companies are slipping the term into their marketing materials, demos and presentations, there’s not a lot of evidence that vendors in the content management system software (CMS) ecosystem are doing much more than dabbling in AI.
Here at Poppulo, we’re doing a lot more than just dabbling. But we asked a third-party expert to have an arms-length look at what’s really happening with AI in the digital signage sector, and readers can draw their own conclusions on how we match up.
Just like some technology companies have been accused of green-washing—asserting products and practices are more environmentally friendly than they really are—our expert suggests there’s some “AI washing” going on.
Old Is New Again
By far, the biggest tracks of activity in “AI-powered” digital signage are content generation and audience measurement tools. The first is essentially a boosted variation on what companies already have, while the other has, in reality, been around for some 20 years.
Numerous companies have demos or working services that use third-party Large Language Models like ChatGPT to quickly and inexpensively generate content for screens. The problem is the creative work that methodology knocks out tends to best be described as serviceable.
AI can be used to heavily automate final visuals for screens in retail, workspaces and other environments. But the trade-offs may well be material that still looks like it originated with pre-designed, pre-determined layout templates. The final designs may look OK, but just OK.
Most digital signage software and solutions companies have long had template libraries that allow customers to quickly edit and publish messaging, using layouts designed and curated by humans.
In many cases, the AI tools being touted by software companies for content creation are not much more than shortcuts. Users can prompt for an image or for suggestions on tightening the written copy for on-screen messaging, but the results are coming back from ChatGPT or some other big-time LLM service. So really, it’s eliminating two or three mouse clicks. Maybe.
Assessing The Crowd By Screens
Using video cameras to anonymously detect and characterize the crowds that pass by screens in different environments—like shopping malls, stadiums and mass transport facilities—has been termed a powerful use of AI. And it is, but computer vision has been around the industry for two decades. It’s based on a subset of AI called machine learning.
The technology is already so well-established there are some 2,500 optimized algorithms available in an open source (aka free) software library for classical and state-of-the-art computer vision functions. Yet it is being marketed as innovative.
The commercial companies that have been focused on computer vision for digital signage and digital out of home have often struggled to get beyond pilots and trials, in part because the notion of tailoring messaging in real-time to the characteristics of viewers is challenging and flawed.
They’ve also struggled because the technology adds more hardware and software costs when budgets for scaled deployments are already tight.
However, the emergence of retail media networks and demands by media buyers for better measurement of ad-based screen networks has finally led to wider adoption.
Getting Practical
Templates and audience analytics are akin to low-hanging fruit—established, readily-accessible and easily tied to AI. But the real value and future for AI in digital signage is about pragmatism—accelerating, streamlining and improving the day-to-day work of managing screen networks.
That’s especially true for networks that have many screens and, often, in many locations
AI really does provide super-powers to the teams who plan, populate and manage networks of screens around organizations: in workplaces of all stripes, the hospitality sector, and sprawling, multi-dimensional operations like airlines and airports.
The key term to remember here is agentic AI—the application of AI tools to both live and stored data, to support and run well-defined functions that sit on top of a cloud management software platform like Poppulo.
That may sound complicated, but it’s something we already see most days. We’re running into agentic AI when we’re doing things like online shopping from big e-commerce sites, or working with a business’s online customer service. The chatbots we interact with are using agentic AI to field questions and kick back answers using stored knowledge and pre-established parameters.
Poppulo uses agentic AI to power a set of intelligent, autonomous agents that manage and optimize a variety of communication tasks, across their lifecycles. The intent is to reduce manual work and increase flexibility for our customers, as well as improve the performance and impacts of communications.
Optimizing With Agentic
Here’s how Poppulo approaches AI:
The agentic-based Analyze Agent steadily interprets real-time data from digital signage screens and communication campaign performance. What users get are hyper-personalized insights, sentiment analysis, and real-time recommendations on how messaging can be optimized.
Getting messages out in a timely manner is fundamental, but it’s so much better if that messaging is engaging, and when in environments like workplaces it positively drives factors like morale and productivity.
Analyze also scans a Poppulo-driven network to spot and flag potential problems before they impact visibility. It does automated checks to confirm scheduled messages are showing as intended. And it tracks user actions, scanning logs to give the people managing networks full and intelligent visibility into things like user action and content changes.
One of the most well-established marketing propositions in digital signage has been the notion of putting the right messages in the right places at the right times. Using practical tools like Analyze AI maximizes that critical metric of success.
Poppulo also has a content toolset, but Poppulo Designer is so much more than a legacy template library with elemental hooks into an LLM. Designer is an agile platform that combines intuitive drag-and-drop tools with smart AI automation, and data insights, that enables users to create, manage, and optimize content both quickly and effectively.
Designer’s agent offers data-driven content suggestions that are based on variables like screen context and historical performance, so the finished material is relevant and impactful. Content can be linked to data tables, automating messaging like KPIs and schedules.
On the operations side, Designer streamlines both scheduling and publishing, using AI insights and optimization to ensure messaging gets on screens at peak engagement times across a network.
The Future Is Agentic
If a digital signage CMS provider is touting its AI efforts without talking agentic, that’s what poker players call a “tell”. People in Texas might say “All hat, no cattle.”
You want to be looking at software firms that understand impacts and outcomes, and how agentic AI will drive them. AI agents built within a platform can autonomously manage and execute complex workflows without needing human intervention. They learn and optimize processes over time, and can handle multiple tasks at once.
Agents take repetitive tasks out of the picture, and free up time for the people tasked with managing what can be complicated, highly involved screen networks to focus less on upkeep and more on strategy and optimization.
They also never sleep. Never take coffee breaks, and certainly not vacations. They speak whatever languages are made available to them, and when there’s a problem, they can sift through knowledge bases and records and have a resolution plan in seconds, not minutes or hours.
AI has arrived in digital signage. But it’s anything but evenly applied so far.