IAB releases agentic AI roadmap for digital advertising

The roadmap shows how digital advertising can scale AI-driven execution with existing standards rather than rebuilding the ecosystem from scratch.

By ,
Senior Editor, MarTech
January 6, 2026 • 2 minutes read

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    IAB Tech Lab released an agentic roadmap outlining how the digital advertising industry can scale agentic buying and selling without tearing down what already works. The plan focuses on extending existing standards with new agentic and high-performance protocols, rather than creating entirely new ones, to support secure and interoperable agentic execution. To move faster, the organization is also making a dedicated investment in AI development, including adding new engineering resources.

    According to IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur, agentic execution isn’t some future concept — it’s already happening in digital advertising today. The challenge, he said, is scaling it responsibly without fragmenting the ecosystem. The roadmap doubles down on open, shared standards as the foundation, aiming to avoid the confusion and inefficiencies that come with introducing multiple competing frameworks.

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    At the core of the roadmap are well-established standards the industry already relies on, including OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, VAST and the Deal API, along with measurement and privacy frameworks like Open Measurement, the Conversion API, GPP and TCF. These are being paired with newer protocols such as Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent and gRPC to support machine-speed execution and coordination between independent systems, while maintaining governance and trust.

    Looking ahead to 2026, IAB Tech Lab plans to roll out open-source reference implementations for buyer and seller agents, standardized agent profiles and additional tooling to support agentic workflows in production. The organization will also host a public webinar on January 28, 2026, followed by a series of in-person Agentic AI boot camps starting in February. The goal is to help agencies, publishers, brands and tech providers adopt agentic execution faster, with less risk and without rebuilding the digital advertising stack from scratch.

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    Digital advertisingMarketing artificial intelligence (AI)
    Constantine von Hoffman
    Senior Editor, MarTech

    Constantine von Hoffman is senior editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.

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