IAB Tech Lab releases roadmap to scale agentic advertising

IAB Tech Lab has released a roadmap detailing how digital advertising standards will evolve to support large-scale agentic buying and selling, expanding on existing protocols with new agentic and high-performance systems.

The roadmap describes how the organization will build on widely adopted transaction, measurement, and privacy standards to support secure, interoperable agentic execution. According to the lab, the initiative is designed to avoid introducing new standards that could fragment the digital advertising ecosystem.

“Agentic execution is already part of how digital advertising operates today,” said Anthony Katsur, chief executive officer of IAB Tech Lab. “Open, interoperable standards are what make that possible, and our focus is on scaling it responsibly.”

Current advertising standards such as OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, VAST and Deal API, along with frameworks like the Global Privacy Platform (GPP) and Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), will serve as the foundation. These will be extended with protocols including Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent and gRPC to enable low-latency, machine-speed execution.

The roadmap also references the Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF), released by IAB Tech Lab in 2025, which defines how large language models and autonomous agents can transact in real time without performance degradation.

Planned initiatives for 2026 include:

• Open-source reference implementations of buyer and seller agents
• A neutral Model Context Protocol reference server
• Standardized agent profiles
• Protocol Buffers and gRPC mappings for existing specifications
• New trust, provenance, and measurement signals

To support implementation and adoption, IAB Tech Lab will host a public webinar titled “Reviewing the Agentic AI Standards Roadmap” on Jan. 28 at 11 a.m. Eastern. A series of in-person workshops and boot camps will begin Feb. 12 at the IAB Ad Lab, continuing monthly.

Industry leaders expressed support for the roadmap’s focus on interoperability and continuity.

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“At NBCUniversal, we believe that interoperability is essential to maintaining performance while unlocking the next phase of automation,” said Ryan McConville, executive vice president of advertising platforms and operations.

George Panagopoulos, chief technology officer at Experian Marketing Services, said, “Scale only works when interoperability is real.”

Nishant Khatri, executive vice president of product management at PubMatic, said the roadmap helps integrate agentic execution into existing infrastructure “while preserving interoperability across the ecosystem.”

Ray Ghanbari, chief technology officer at Index Exchange, said, “Tech Lab’s Agentic Roadmap builds on this proven model, extending transparency and interoperability to service-to-service and agentic transactions as well.”

IAB Tech Lab is also increasing its engineering investment to support AI-focused development aligned with the roadmap.