Key Points
- IAB Tech Lab released an Agentic Roadmap outlining how digital advertising can scale AI-driven buying and selling using existing standards.
- The plan extends frameworks like OpenRTB, VAST and AdCOM with new protocols to avoid market fragmentation.
- IAB Tech Lab will invest in AI development and launch open-source tools, training and boot camps starting in 2026.
IAB Tech Lab on Tuesday released an Agentic Roadmap that outlines how the digital advertising industry can scale agentic buying and selling by extending existing technical standards with new protocols, rather than rebuilding the market’s core infrastructure.
The roadmap is designed to support secure and interoperable agentic execution across digital advertising while preserving the foundational languages and frameworks already used across the ecosystem. As part of the initiative, IAB Tech Lab said it is making a significant engineering investment focused exclusively on AI development, including the addition of new development resources, to accelerate delivery against the roadmap.
“Agentic execution is already part of how digital advertising operates today,” said Anthony Katsur, the CEO of IAB Tech Lab. “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.”
According to IAB Tech Lab, the roadmap builds on widely adopted transaction, management and delivery standards including OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, VAST and the recently released Deal API. Measurement frameworks such as the Open Measurement ID and the pending Conversion API, along with privacy and regulatory standards including the Global Privacy Protocol and Transparency & Consent Framework, also remain central. Existing taxonomies and agentic control-plane standards, including the Agentic RTB Framework, are incorporated to allow autonomous agents and large language models to participate in real-time transactions without degrading performance.
To support modern agentic execution, IAB Tech Lab is integrating these standards with protocols such as Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent and gRPC to enable secure, high-speed coordination between independent systems.
“The industry gets the best of both worlds,” Katsur said. “High-performance agentic execution combined with the interoperability, governance, and trust the market already relies on, without reinventing everything.”
Planned initiatives for 2026 include open-source reference implementations for buyer and seller agents, standardized agent profiles, Protocol Buffers and gRPC mappings for existing specifications, and new trust, provenance, measurement and transaction-integrity signals aligned with privacy frameworks.
Industry executives voiced support for the approach, including leaders from Comcast’s NBC Universal Advertising & Partnerships, Experian Marketing Services, PubMatic and Index Exchange.
To promote adoption, IAB Tech Lab will host a public webinar on January 28, 2026 and will begin a series of monthly in-person Agentic AI boot camps starting February 12, 2026 at the IAB Ad Lab, providing hands-on guidance for implementing agentic workflows using open industry standards.
