In an agentic world, remember: the IAB still sets the rules around here.
Yesterday at CES, the IAB Tech Lab unveiled its Agentic Roadmap, outlining how the industry can scale agentic buying and selling without tearing down the existing programmatic stack.
At a high level, the roadmap explains how today’s core standards can be extended—rather than replaced—to support AI-driven, autonomous media execution across the ecosystem.
Under the hood, that means building on familiar frameworks like OpenRTB, VAST, and privacy and consent standards, while layering in modern protocols designed for coordination between agents. The idea is to make agentic systems interoperable, secure, and production-ready, without forcing the market to learn a whole new language.
IAB Tech Lab also said it’s backing this push with a dedicated engineering investment focused on AI development.
Why This Matters:
Agentic advertising—where software agents autonomously plan, negotiate, and execute media transactions—is already creeping into how programmatic works today. In fact, according to the WFA, over half of brands are using or plan to use agents in 2026.
Rather than blowing up the stack, IAB Tech Lab is betting that agentic systems can run on top of familiar foundations like OpenRTB, AdCOM, and others, while layering in newer protocols such as Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent.
For agencies, publishers, and adtech vendors, this approach promises faster adoption, fewer bespoke integrations, and lower operational risk. In short: modernize execution without rewriting the rules of the market.
There’s also a subtext here. In recent months, there’s been a push to create alternative, industry-led standards outside the IAB orbit. This roadmap feels like the IAB reclaiming its position on agentic and saying that it should evolve through the existing standards body, not splinter into parallel frameworks.
Experts React:
“Agentic execution is already part of how digital advertising operates today,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab. “Open, interoperable standards are what make that possible, and our focus is on scaling it responsibly.”
Nishant Khatri, EVP of Product Management at PubMatic, added: “Agentic advertising only scales when intent, execution, and governance evolve together. IAB Tech Lab’s roadmap shows how agentic execution can be integrated into the existing digital advertising foundation.”
Our Take:
Agentic has been the key talking point/focus at CES this year. DoubleVerify launched an agentic offering, PubMatic announced one, and nearly every serious adtech conversation has circled back to autonomous systems.
But none of it works at scale without shared standards. This roadmap is IAB Tech Lab planting a flag early: agentic advertising can’t be a free-for-all. If it’s going to work, it’ll need interoperability, and the IAB wants to be/should be the one defining it.
