Agentic buying is "early days" but two-thirds of buyers are already leaning in

The agentic theme got a sober framing from Omnicom Media's chief investment officer Maureen Bosetti, who told Beet.TV the technology is real but nascent: "We're certainly in the early days of that, but that is where I see there's going to be change for sure in the next couple of years." Her argument is that the fragmentation problem inverts the planning sequence, and agents should serve the consumer-first logic, not the channel-first habit: "It's really important that brands and clients really start with the consumer first." The adoption numbers are ahead of the reality on the ground: the IAB's 2026 Outlook Study found 96% of buyers are now aware of agentic AI for ad buying and roughly two-thirds are focused on agentic campaign execution, but actual deal execution remains the least mature layer, with adoption strongest for performance analysis and creative testing. Bosetti sees the near-term win in inventory discovery and activation speed through "our SSP connections or other direct integrations."

The crux

The gap between 96% awareness and genuine deal execution is the story: agentic buying is being adopted for the analysis and creative-testing layer first, while the transaction layer that would actually rewire publisher yield is the slowest to mature.

Sell-side read

Publishers should read the two-thirds execution focus as a buying-side signal to make inventory agent-readable now, before the buyers finish building the pipe, or risk being excluded from a demand channel that forms without them.

Watch

Whether the IAB's Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP) and the rival Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) converge into one standard, or whether publishers must build to both.