Optable's Agentic Marketplace bets agents can cut the ad-tech tax

Optable has opened an Agentic Marketplace, unveiled at Optable Connect on 8 October, that lets publishers package inventory, audience data, targeting and pricing into products that buyer AI agents can discover and negotiate directly, with publishers retaining control over pricing and approval. The pitch is the ad-tech tax: eMarketer data presented at the event put roughly 41% of US real-time-bidding display spend toward programmatic fees in 2026, and Optable says publishers "pay nothing to sell through the marketplace", with buyers paying for advanced targeting as a service rather than a per-transaction fee. "Software should be paid for as software," said co-founder and chief executive Vlad Stesin. Goodway Group chief executive Paul Frampton-Calero described a campaign going "from start to QA in the space of, I think, 30 minutes". But the company's own chief product officer Bosko Milekic flagged the risk plainly: if every intermediary introduces its own agent and keeps taking a percentage of media spend, agentic advertising could "recreate today's complexity and inefficiencies at machine speed". The market Optable is targeting remains tiny, with eMarketer pegging agentic media buying at $100m in 2026, growing to $3.9bn in 2027 and $29.5bn in 2028.

The crux

A vendor is now selling a concrete mechanism to strip intermediary fees out of direct deals and let publishers keep more of every dollar, but the same agentic layer could just as easily re-intermediate the supply chain if incumbents bolt agents onto their existing take rates.

Sell-side read

The zero-fee-to-sellers model is worth interrogating even if you are not an Optable customer, because it is the first real pressure test of whether agentic buying cuts the 41% programmatic fee load or simply relabels it.

Watch

Whether a DSP or SSP responds with its own agent-to-agent marketplace, and whether any scaled buyer moves real budget onto an agentic marketplace before year-end.