IAB Tech Lab Charts AI Future with New Agentic Advertising Roadmap

NEW YORK, NY – January 06, 2026 – The IAB Tech Lab today unveiled a pivotal strategy to steer the future of digital advertising, releasing its Agentic Roadmap designed to integrate advanced artificial intelligence into the fabric of the ad ecosystem. The plan outlines how the industry can scale autonomous AI 'agents' for buying and selling media by extending well-established standards with modern, high-performance protocols, promising a future of enhanced efficiency without sacrificing the market's foundational stability.

This move by the global digital advertising technical standard-setting body is a direct response to the rapid, and at times chaotic, proliferation of AI solutions over the past year. By choosing to build upon existing frameworks like OpenRTB and VAST, the organization aims to prevent market fragmentation and provide a unified path for agencies, publishers, and brands to adopt AI-driven automation responsibly. To accelerate this vision, IAB Tech Lab announced a significant new engineering investment focused exclusively on AI development.

"Agentic execution is already part of how digital advertising operates today," said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, in a statement. "Open, interoperable standards are what make that possible, and our focus is on scaling it responsibly. The fastest and smartest way forward is to build on an existing shared foundation, not introduce multiple new standards that create fragmentation."

The Blueprint for an Automated Future

The core of the roadmap lies in its definition of 'agentic systems' and how they differ from current automation. While programmatic advertising has long automated transactions, agentic AI introduces a higher level of autonomous decision-making. These systems, powered by large language models and other advanced AI, are designed to be proactive and goal-oriented, capable of making independent choices and adapting strategies in real-time with minimal human oversight.

Instead of creating a new language from scratch, the IAB Tech Lab's strategy is to enhance the industry’s existing lexicon. Core standards that already power billions of daily transactions—including OpenRTB for bidding, VAST for video, and the recently released Deal API—will be integrated with modern, high-performance protocols like Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent, and gRPC. This hybrid approach is designed to support the machine-speed execution and scalable coordination required by autonomous agents.

This technical blueprint also builds on the Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF), released in 2025, which provides rules for how AI models can participate in real-time transactions without sacrificing performance. The goal is a seamless evolution, not a revolution that would force the industry into costly and complex re-platforming.

"The industry gets the best of both worlds," Katsur continued. "High-performance agentic execution combined with the interoperability, governance, and trust the market already relies on, without reinventing everything."

Unifying the Ecosystem and Averting Fragmentation

The strategic importance of a standardized roadmap cannot be overstated. Throughout 2025, the ad tech industry saw a surge of competing AI frameworks, raising concerns of a potential 'Tower of Babel' scenario where disparate systems would be unable to communicate, leading to inefficiency and walled gardens. The IAB Tech Lab's initiative is a clear attempt to provide a central, unifying force.

This proactive stance has garnered widespread support from major industry players who see interoperability as essential for sustainable growth. Ryan McConville, EVP at NBCUniversal Advertising & Partnerships, praised the focus on a common foundation, stating, "At NBCUniversal, we believe that interoperability is essential to maintaining performance while unlocking the next phase of automation, and we look forward to continued collaboration."

Echoing this sentiment, George Panagopoulos, Chief Technology Officer at Experian Marketing Services, noted, "Scale only works when interoperability is real. This roadmap makes it clear how agentic execution can expand without sacrificing control or transparency."

For 2026, the Tech Lab plans to release a suite of practical tools to drive adoption, including open-source reference implementations of buyer and seller agents, a neutral server for the Model Context Protocol, and standardized agent profiles. These resources are intended to lower the barrier to entry and ensure that companies of all sizes can participate in the agentic future.

Business Implications and Market Realities

For stakeholders across the advertising landscape, the roadmap promises tangible benefits: faster speed-to-value, reduced integration complexity, and lower operational risk. Early experiments with agentic systems have shown dramatic efficiency gains, with some tests indicating an 87% reduction in campaign setup time and a 70% drop in time spent on issue resolution.

This shift is expected to reshape roles, creating smaller, more senior marketing teams focused on high-level strategy, creative effectiveness, and experimentation, rather than manual campaign management. As AI agents become the standard execution layer, the competitive advantage will shift from basic automation to strategic clarity and the ability to define precise marketing intent.

Ad tech vendors are already aligning with this vision. Nishant Khatri, EVP of Product Management at PubMatic, remarked, "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, accelerating adoption while preserving interoperability across the ecosystem."

Similarly, Ray Ghanbari, CTO at Index Exchange, emphasized the continuity of industry principles. "Our multi-party digital advertising ecosystem operates best when we all embrace, improve, and extend the transparency and interoperability standards that enable our industry," he said. "Tech Lab's Agentic Roadmap builds on this proven model."

Governance in the Age of Autonomous Agents

As automation becomes more intelligent and autonomous, questions of trust, privacy, and governance move to the forefront. The Agentic Roadmap directly addresses these concerns by reinforcing its commitment to existing privacy and regulatory frameworks, including the Global Privacy Protocol (GPP) and the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF).

The IAB Tech Lab is prioritizing the development of new signals for "trust, provenance, measurement, and transaction-integrity" to ensure that as AI agents take on more responsibility, their actions remain transparent and accountable. This ensures that brands operating in highly regulated markets or handling sensitive consumer data do not have to choose between performance and compliance.

By embedding these safeguards within the evolving standards, the organization aims to build industry confidence and ensure that the agentic future is not only efficient but also ethical and secure. To facilitate industry-wide understanding and adoption, the IAB Tech Lab will host a public webinar on January 28, 2026, followed by a series of monthly in-person 'Agentic AI Boot Camps' and workshops beginning in February, designed to provide hands-on guidance for implementing these new standards.