AI is reshaping every industry, but few are as ripe for reinvention as advertising, a business built on a slow and expensive mix of creativity and manpower.In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, host David Hemenway sits down with New York Angels member Mike Jacobs and Anna Stepura, founder of Adlyse, an AI-driven performance marketing platform built for direct response advertisers.Anna is a repeat founder building her third company, with nine years of experience as a performance marketer herself before she set out to fix the problems she lived inside. Mike has spent his career scaling growth systems and now invests in the founders building what comes next.Together they unpack what performance marketing actually measures, why relying on advertising platform algorithms alone leaves money on the table, and how agentic AI is moving the work from recommendation to execution. Anna explains why she built Adlyse to work on behalf of the advertiser rather than the platform, Mike describes what convinced him to back Anna specifically rather than just the idea, and both push back on the assumption that AI removes the need for human judgment in marketing. Brand positioning, differentiation, and knowing what a company actually stands for, they argue, are the parts no algorithm can do for you.The conversation also turns candid on leadership, what investors really look for when backing a repeat founder, and whether the industry's new precision is actually as precise as it looks.Learn more about Adlyse and about joining the New York Angels at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with questions or comments and listen to past episodes at theangelnest.com.