NEW YORK, March 09, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Dstillery, the leading AI ad targeting company, today announced that its Chief Data Scientist, Melinda Han Williams, Ph.D., has been named an honoree in ADWEEK’s 2026 AI Power 50.
“Melinda is the rare kind of leader who changes not just her company, but the direction of an entire industry,” said Michael Beebe, CEO of Dstillery. “She combines extraordinary technical expertise with a rare ability to make complex AI concepts accessible and actionable. This recognition from ADWEEK reflects both her groundbreaking innovation and the lasting impact she continues to have across the AI and marketing landscape.”
The AI Power 50 celebrates executives and innovators actively shaping how AI is applied, scaled, and embedded across the industry. This year’s honorees represent leaders turning artificial intelligence from emerging possibility into real-world, operational impact.
As Chief Data Scientist at Dstillery, Melinda has played a central role in advancing the practical use of AI in advertising by transforming complex machine learning systems into tools that operate directly within everyday marketing workflows. Over more than a decade at the company, she has led the development of Dstillery’s core AI platforms, including its Multimodal AI technology. Most recently, she led the creation of DS-1, an agentic AI platform that allows marketers to discover, build, and activate audiences through a single conversational system.
Rather than positioning AI as a separate tool, Melinda has focused on embedding intelligence directly into media teams’ workflows. Under her leadership, DS-1 performs real operational actions, evaluating signals, generating predictive models, and activating audiences across platforms in minutes rather than days. By transforming AI from a tool into an execution partner, she has helped agencies and brands confidently integrate AI into their everyday media operations. This shift from AI as an assistant to AI as an acting agent has helped accelerate adoption across agencies and brands, making AI a trusted and core component of modern marketing operations.
Beyond product innovation, Melinda is widely recognized as a thought leader in applied AI and Agentic. She is a frequent keynote speaker and panelist, known for translating advanced machine learning concepts into clear, actionable frameworks for marketers. In 2025, she led hands-on industry workshops where programmatic professionals built and deployed their first AI agents, and she is the architect behind the majority of Dstillery’s 25 AI-related patents.
Melinda continues to share her expertise across the industry, including speaking at The Female Quotient Lounge at POSSIBLE Miami this April, ADWEEK House at Cannes in June, and Advertising Week New York in October.
ABOUT DSTILLERY
Dstillery is the leading AI ad targeting company. We empower brands and agencies to target their best prospects for high-performing programmatic advertising campaigns. Our audience targeting solutions are powered by multimodal AI — a breakthrough in AI that learns from any form of data and applies it to any form of data, making it the most flexible targeting engine in the market. Backed by our award-winning Data Science, Dstillery has earned 25 patents (and counting) for the AI technology that powers our precise, scalable audiences. To learn more, visit us at http://www.dstillery.com or follow us on LinkedIn.
MEDIA CONTACT
Michael Vaughan
mvaughan@kcsa.com
(813) 210-1706
