Infillion Challenges Ad Tech Giants with Open AI Buying Platform

NEW YORK, NY – December 16, 2025 – Ad tech firm Infillion today launched a new platform designed to let artificial intelligence systems autonomously manage digital advertising campaigns, a move that positions the company at the center of a burgeoning industry debate: will the future of AI-driven advertising be open and interoperable, or dominated by closed, proprietary ecosystems?

The company unveiled its Infillion Agent Connector, which it describes as the industry’s first “agent-native” media execution platform. Unlike traditional demand-side platforms (DSPs) that have bolted on AI features, Infillion claims its new offering was engineered from the ground up for AI agents to directly plan, purchase, and optimize programmatic advertising without human intervention.

This launch comes as the advertising industry races to harness the power of agentic AI. Citing an aggregate of data from industry analysts Gartner and WARC, Infillion projects that by 2028, over $100 billion in programmatic ad spend will be controlled by AI agents. This forecast sits within a much larger prediction from Gartner, which anticipates AI agents will mediate over $15 trillion in B2B spending by the same year, signaling a seismic shift toward automated, machine-to-machine commerce.

The Dawn of the AI Media Buyer

The promise of Infillion's platform is a move toward what some are calling “hands-free” media buying. The Agent Connector is designed to replace manual user interface workflows with machine-driven processes across the entire campaign lifecycle. Its modular architecture, built on the assets of acquired companies like MediaMath and Drawbridge, provides AI agents with direct control over campaign planning, identity resolution, creative management, real-time bidding, analytics, and optimization.

This represents a fundamental change from the current paradigm, where AI often acts as a “co-pilot” or optimization layer within a human-operated system. An agent-native platform, by contrast, treats the AI as the primary operator. The goal is to eliminate friction and enable AI systems—whether commercial models or custom-built agency solutions—to execute complex strategies at a scale and speed unattainable by human teams alone.

“AI agents are becoming the operators of programmatic media, and agencies want one AI command center orchestrating everything, not a different co-pilot for every DSP,” said Simon Asselin, Chief Technology Officer at Infillion, in the company's announcement. “This is the Netflix-versus-Blockbuster moment for ad tech. The winners in this shift will be infrastructure players; agencies and brands can bring their own AI to—without fragmentation, friction, or lock-in.”

A Battle of Philosophies: Open Infrastructure vs. Walled Gardens

Infillion’s strategic bet is a direct challenge to the “walled garden” approach of tech giants like Google and Meta, which offer powerful AI automation but within their own closed environments. By championing an open, AI-agnostic path, Infillion is aligning itself with a growing chorus of industry voices calling for greater interoperability and transparency.

The debate centers on control and flexibility. A closed ecosystem offers a streamlined, integrated experience but can lead to vendor lock-in, data silos, and a lack of transparency into how AI models make decisions. An open model, as proposed by Infillion, promises to give agencies and brands the freedom to choose their own AI command center and connect it to a neutral execution layer, fostering competition and innovation.

This sentiment is echoed by The Marketing Cloud, a company building a unified AI orchestration layer for media. "Our architecture needs open, API-first infrastructure—not closed co-pilots," said Mansoor Basha, the company's Chief Technology Officer. "We send campaign parameters, partners execute, and results flow back into our Palantir-powered intelligence layer. Infillion's MCP-powered, agent-native platform is exactly this kind of open execution stack—enabling true interoperability without fragmenting our command center."

However, Infillion is not alone in pursuing this vision. The Trade Desk, a major independent DSP, launched its Kokai AI platform in 2023 with a similar goal of providing an alternative to big tech's dominance. Other players, from established firms like Magnite to startups, are also developing agentic capabilities, suggesting the race to build the foundational infrastructure for AI-powered advertising is well underway.

The Protocol for Progress: MCP and the Push for Standards

A key technical pillar of Infillion’s open strategy is its integration with the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Announced by AI firm Anthropic in late 2024, MCP is an open standard designed to function as a universal adapter, allowing AI models to securely connect to and understand data from various external systems without needing custom integrations.

For ad tech, MCP provides a common language for AI agents. This standardization is critical for enabling the seamless communication required for autonomous operations. Building on this foundation, a consortium of ad tech companies—including PubMatic, Yahoo, and Scope3—launched the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) in October 2025. AdCP aims to standardize how AI agents plan, transact, and optimize campaigns across the fragmented advertising landscape.

Infillion's adoption of MCP places it firmly within this industry-wide movement toward open standards. By ensuring its platform is “plug-and-play” for any MCP-compliant AI, the company is not just selling a product but advocating for a new, more collaborative industry architecture.

Infillion's Strategic Reinvention

The launch of Agent Connector marks a significant strategic pivot for Infillion. Formed from a $750 million investment and the unification of notable ad tech players like MediaMath, TrueX, Gimbal, and Drawbridge, the company is leveraging its deep technology stack to reinvent itself as an essential infrastructure provider for the agentic era. The company’s consistent appearance on the Inc. 5000 list points to a sustained growth trajectory supporting this ambitious transformation.

Recent strategic hires, including Chief Operating Officer Brian Kaminsky, have been explicitly tasked with scaling the company's composable, agent-enabled platform. This move from providing disparate services to offering a unified, open execution layer is a calculated effort to solve long-standing industry problems of inefficiency, waste, and opacity.

As the advertising world stands on the cusp of a profound technological shift, Infillion's gambit is clear: to become the neutral ground upon which the next generation of AI-driven marketing is built. The success of this strategy will depend not only on its technology but on its ability to convince an entire industry that an open, collaborative future is more powerful than a collection of closed, competing kingdoms.