IAB Unveils Agentic AI Roadmap for Digital Ads
â–¼ Summary
– The IAB Tech Lab released a roadmap to scale agentic buying and selling in digital advertising by extending existing industry standards, not replacing them.
– The plan emphasizes using open, shared standards to avoid ecosystem fragmentation and inefficiency, as agentic execution is already occurring today.
– It integrates established protocols like OpenRTB and VAST with newer ones like Model Context Protocol to enable secure, high-speed machine coordination.
– For 2026, the Lab plans to release open-source tools, agent profiles, and host educational events like a webinar and boot camps to support adoption.
– The overall goal is to help the industry adopt agentic execution faster and with less risk, without needing to rebuild its existing infrastructure.
The digital advertising industry is poised for a significant shift with the introduction of a new strategic plan focused on agentic AI. This roadmap provides a clear path for scaling automated, intelligent buying and selling systems while preserving the substantial investments already made in current technology. The approach centers on enhancing existing, widely-adopted standards with new protocols designed for high-speed, secure machine-to-machine interaction, rather than mandating a costly and disruptive industry-wide overhaul.
IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur emphasized that agentic execution is not a distant future possibility but a present reality. The primary obstacle is scaling these autonomous systems in a responsible manner that prevents market fragmentation. The organization’s strategy strongly advocates for open, shared standards as the essential bedrock. This focus aims to sidestep the confusion and operational drag that inevitably arise when multiple proprietary and competing frameworks enter the ecosystem simultaneously.
The foundation of this plan rests on the industry’s most trusted technical standards. These include OpenRTB, AdCOM, and VAST for transaction and ad serving, alongside critical measurement and privacy frameworks like Open Measurement and the Global Privacy Platform (GPP). To empower agentic workflows, these established systems will be integrated with newer, high-performance protocols. Technologies such as Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent are specifically designed to facilitate machine-speed negotiation and coordination between independent buyer and seller agents, all within a governed framework that maintains accountability and trust.
To accelerate practical adoption, the IAB Tech Lab has outlined concrete steps for the coming year. The organization plans to release open-source reference implementations for both buyer and seller agents, providing blueprints that companies can adapt. This will be accompanied by standardized agent profiles and specialized tooling to integrate agentic workflows into live production environments. Furthermore, a comprehensive support program is scheduled, beginning with a public webinar in late January 2026, followed by a series of hands-on Agentic AI boot camps. The objective is to equip agencies, publishers, brands, and technology providers with the knowledge and resources to implement these autonomous systems more swiftly, with reduced risk, and without the need to reconstruct their entire advertising technology infrastructure from the ground up.
(Source: MarTech)
