Agentic buying to hit scale within a year, most ad execs say

Fifty ad executives across 44 European markets told IAB Europe that 58% of them expect agentic ad buying to reach operational use or scale within a year, in research Digiday's Seb Joseph reports. The sample is lopsided: 86% of respondents at organisations with 501-plus staff already run agentic systems where people and agents plan, delegate and execute together, versus 48% at firms under 500 staff. On the sell side, CNN and News UK are building seller-side agents to receive those requests, and WPP and Omnicom are testing buyer agents. The sceptics are not soft: Ian Maxwell, CEO of Converge Digital, asks "what value is agentic buying bringing? It automates a few small parts of a huge process yet still needs human monitoring and oversight." Security is the top concern among respondents, privacy second; the most common live use today is reporting and dashboards, then programmatic optimisation.

The crux

The market has moved from "will agents buy media" to "who steers them and who is liable", and the gap between large and small firms means the near-term benefit accrues to a handful of scaled buyers and the sell-side tech that can meet their agent APIs.

Sell-side read

Publisher revenue teams should treat agent-to-agent interfaces as a real near-term demand channel, not a science project - being agent-readable (taxonomies, deal metadata, clean pricing) is what gets a publisher into the consideration set when a buyer agent assembles its shortlist.

Watch

Whether IAB Tech Lab ratifies the AAMP/OpenProposal spec (public comment closes 22 Oct) into a workable buyer-seller handshake, or the standard war stalls adoption.