InMobi Advertising today opened its Buyer Hub deal platform to agencies and managed service demand-side platforms, and placed a conversational AI agent inside it. The move ends a fourteen-month wait for the agency access the company promised when the platform first went live, and it lands in a market where nearly every large sell-side company has shipped an agent of its own.

The announcement was issued from San Mateo, California at 9:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, August 13, 2026. According to InMobi Advertising, the new agent runs on what the company calls its unified intelligence layer and sits on Buyer Hub, the self-serve deal platform the company operates for media buyers. The agent is described as helping buyers discover inventory, build deals and optimise campaigns through natural language instructions rather than through form fields and email threads.

Alongside the agent, InMobi Advertising said Buyer Hub is now open to agencies and managed service demand-side platforms, giving those teams direct access to the company's ad inventory. That access arrives with three supporting capabilities and one forecasting tool, each aimed at a specific complaint about how agency trading desks currently reach supply-side inventory.

What the platform now contains

Four additions were listed in the announcement. Role-based access control gives agencies account-level view and edit permissions mapped to how their teams are structured, a governance requirement that separates an agency deployment from a single-curator deployment. Inventory discovery allows teams to curate InMobi supply before activation without what the company describes as email back-and-forth. Self-serve reporting surfaces campaign metrics and diagnostics directly to the trading desk rather than routing them through an account manager. Deals Forecasting provides a live estimate of available ad opportunities, presented as a persistent side panel during deal setup so that a deal can be configured before it is activated.

The forecasting panel is the most operationally specific of the four. Deal configuration in programmatic has long carried a timing problem: a buyer assembles targeting parameters, launches, and only then discovers whether the resulting deal has enough addressable supply behind it to spend the budget attached to it. Surfacing an availability estimate during setup moves that discovery earlier in the sequence.

Inside Buyer Hub, according to InMobi Advertising, the agent recommends curation and optimisation moves grounded in live campaign context, while traders retain control over every decision. That division of labour is the design claim the company chose to lead with.

"We built the agent so a trader doesn't have to choose between speed and control. It recommends the curation and optimization moves, and the trader still makes the call. That's the model we think holds up as agentic advertising matures, on both the supply side and the demand side," said Kunal Nagpal, Chief Business Officer, InMobi Advertising.

Nagpal also framed the agency opening as a response to direct demand. "Agencies have been asking us for direct, self-serve access to InMobi supply since we opened Buyer Hub to curators last year, and this is our answer," he said.

A fourteen-month sequence

Buyer Hub debuted in June 2025 as InMobi's self-serve platform for media buyers, with curators live first and agency access held back as the next phase. According to InMobi Advertising, a market requirement scoping exercise conducted with agency and managed service DSP customers shaped the product now going live, and agency demand for direct portal access emerged as the clearest signal from that process.

That is an unusually plain admission of sequencing. The original platform was built around curators, the intermediaries who package inventory and data into deal identifiers for others to buy. Opening the same platform to the agencies that consume those deal identifiers changes who sits at the front of the funnel, and it changes what the platform has to support: multi-client permissioning, audit-friendly reporting, and a workflow that a trading desk can run without a vendor account manager attached to every step.

Access for agencies and managed service DSPs runs through sales-assisted onboarding, with demo and access requests available through the Buyer Hub page. InMobi Advertising said Buyer Hub complements rather than replaces managed service, and that teams can choose self-serve, assisted, or hybrid engagement depending on the account.

Two agency executives were quoted in the announcement.

"We see Buyer Hub as a valuable platform for agencies. Its deal marketplaces make campaign setup more efficient and allow teams to easily activate high-performing inventory. The streamlined activation process is also a strong advantage for trading teams seeking greater efficiency and ease of execution," said Ricky Lo, Senior Manager, Products & Analytics, PMX, Publicis Media.

"We see a lot of potential in using agentic technology to make curation more dynamic and less manual. Buyer Hub is a great example of how agents can bring audience, supply and performance signals together, streamline decisioning, and give buyers the ability to respond more quickly as opportunities emerge," said Gina Whelehan, Group Director of Strategic Partnerships at Butler/Till.

Butler/Till has appeared in this category before. The independent agency was named among the early participants when PubMatic launched AgenticOS on January 5, 2026, alongside WPP Media and MiQ. A December 2025 campaign run on that infrastructure with Butler/Till was later cited by PubMatic as producing 40% more impressions than comparable non-agentic activity, a 5.5x cost efficiency for the agency, and a 98% average video completion rate, figures the vendor attributed to a single test.

Both sides of the transaction

Today's launch follows a partnership announced on Wednesday, June 3, 2026, under which InMobi opened premium connected television and mobile in-app supply, including Glance, to AI-powered buying agents on Scope3 Interchange. That connection was built on the Ad Context Protocol, and according to InMobi Advertising it made roughly 2 billion mobile users and Glance's 300 million active devices reachable through a single protocol connection.

Taken together, the company now operates an agent facing buyers who arrive through Scope3's agent-to-agent environment and an agent facing traders who log into Buyer Hub directly. According to InMobi Advertising, that gives it an expert agent on both sides of the transaction: one that helps supply reach the right buyer, and one that helps agency traders reach the right supply.

The two-sided framing is not unique to InMobi, and the competitive record is dense. Magnite embedded a seller agent into SpringServe and ran its first agentic test in December 2025 with Scope3 acting as buyer agent. PubMatic launched AgenticOS on January 5, 2026 with live campaigns already running. Magnite added a buyer agent in April 2026 and then launched Orchestration on Thursday, June 11, 2026, a coordination layer letting buyer-side agents connect to sell-side supply, with dentsu and DIRECTV Advertising as beta partners. That same day produced three other agentic launches across the buying layer, from Mediaocean, Teads and Magnite simultaneously.

What separates the InMobi announcement from most of that sequence is where the agent sits. AgenticOS and Orchestration are built for machine-to-machine transactions, in which a buyer's agent negotiates with a seller's agent and a human reviews the outcome afterwards. The Buyer Hub agent is a conversational interface for a human trader who is already inside a portal. It is closer to an assistant than to a counterparty.

Human sign-off as a product feature

The insistence that the trader still makes the call is now a recurring feature of agentic product design rather than a differentiator. Governance layers restricting what agents can transact shipped into AgenticOS earlier this month, recording every decision an agent makes across a five-step approval framework. Fluency blocked AI from touching live ad spendacross roughly 3 billion dollars in budgets under management, positioning restraint itself as the product.

The caution has an evidence base. DataBeat's June 2026 US Programmatic Trends Report recorded a 13.4% CPM advantage for conventional programmatic buyers over AI agents, a finding that ran against vendor-reported efficiency claims from the same period. Agency uptake has been uneven in a pattern that matters for a product aimed at trading desks: research covered in April 2026 found agentic AI reaching 46% of surveyed agencies, with adoption concentrated in ideation at 86.9% and research at 84.0%, against media planning at 29.1% and media buying strategy at 22.1%. Those last two categories are precisely where Buyer Hub's agent is designed to operate.

Demand-side appetite, meanwhile, remains documented. The Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2026 Outlook Study, drawn from more than 200 brands and agency buyers and released on January 28, 2026, placed five of six top advertiser priorities in direct connection with AI capabilities, with two-thirds focused on agentic systems for autonomous campaign execution.

Curation, and who controls it

Buyer Hub is a curation platform before it is an agent platform, and curation carries its own contested history. Analysis published by Equativ in October 2024 recorded match rate losses of 40% to 70% when audience data is synced between platforms, the technical argument behind applying data at the supply-side layer rather than at the demand-side platform. The German industry body BVDW eventually published a twelve-page definitional framework on February 26, 2026, a response to the term's commercial inflation.

The commercial case for sell-side curation has been made repeatedly through 2026. Expedia Group routed 200 petabytes of traveller data into curated deals through Magnite in April 2026 under a DSP-agnostic structure. Mediavine and SWYM extended AI supply shaping across more than 18,000 publisher sites in June 2026. Each of those arrangements applies decisioning closer to the inventory and packages the result as a deal identifier.

Agencies opening a direct line to a supply-side platform also touches a live commercial question about intermediary layers. IAB Spain's first supply-side platform guide, published in April 2026, documented the working media problem the category keeps circling. Agencies have separately been policing intermediary costs with visible force, and the sequence of disputes over platform fees through 2026 has been documented in detail. A self-serve portal that lets a trading desk assemble deals against a single supply source without a managed-service layer in between sits inside that argument, whether or not the announcement frames it that way.

What InMobi has and has not disclosed

The announcement carries no pricing information, no take-rate disclosure, no customer count for Buyer Hub, and no performance figures for the agent. It names two agency executives who commented favourably and describes onboarding as sales-assisted. There is no stated general availability date beyond the launch itself, and no indication of how many agencies or managed service DSPs are already active on the platform.

That disclosure pattern is common across the category and it limits what a buyer can verify independently. The specific claim that a trader retains control over every decision is a design assertion that no external party can currently test, and the forecasting panel's accuracy against realised delivery is unmeasured in public.

InMobi's own recent record supplies mixed context. The company cut 5% of its workforce in February 2024 amid ad tech uncertainty, and partnered with Scope3 in October 2024 on green media segments for mobile and in-app advertising. It joined Kochava's certification programme in March 2026 alongside LG Ad Solutions and Digital Turbine. On July 24, 2026 it launched FRAME Attention, a certified media product that claimed 3.5 times more attentive seconds than equivalent YouTube video ads with validation from Lumen Research. Days ago, co-branded material from InMobi and Amazon Publisher Services reported that four mobile gaming publishers grew revenue by as much as 14 times through an APS mobile SDK bridge beta.

Why this matters for media buyers

For an agency trading desk, the practical change is access rather than intelligence. Direct, permissioned entry to a supply source that previously required a curator or an account manager in between removes a coordination step from deal assembly, and role-based controls make that entry defensible in a multi-client environment where one team's deal terms cannot leak into another's.

The agent layered on top is a workflow instrument whose value depends on whether its recommendations improve on what an experienced trader would have done anyway. The independent pricing comparison available so far points the other way, and the adoption data shows trading desks have been slowest to hand over exactly the tasks this agent addresses. Sell-side platforms are meanwhile competing to become the place where agentic demand lands, a race in which Magnite's chief executive has placed protocol-based buying in a discovery phase and predicted far fewer supply-side platforms surviving it.

What the announcement does establish is that InMobi has now built agent surfaces at both ends of its own supply chain within ten weeks, and that at least one holding company trading desk and one independent agency were willing to attach their names to it.

Timeline

Summary

Who: InMobi Advertising, part of InMobi, launched the product. Kunal Nagpal, Chief Business Officer at InMobi Advertising, provided the company's statements. Ricky Lo, Senior Manager, Products & Analytics at PMX, Publicis Media, and Gina Whelehan, Group Director of Strategic Partnerships at Butler/Till, commented as agency partners. The intended users are agency trading desks and managed service demand-side platforms.

What: A conversational AI agent, running on InMobi's unified intelligence layer, has been placed inside Buyer Hub, the company's self-serve deal platform. Buyer Hub simultaneously opened to agencies and managed service DSPs, adding role-based access control, inventory discovery, self-serve reporting, and a Deals Forecasting side panel that estimates available ad opportunities during deal setup. The agent recommends curation and optimisation moves while traders retain decision authority.

When: The announcement was issued at 9:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, August 13, 2026. Buyer Hub first launched in June 2025 with curators live and agency access promised as a later phase. The launch follows a June 3, 2026 partnership with Scope3 that opened InMobi's premium CTV and mobile in-app supply, including Glance, to buying agents on Scope3 Interchange.

Where: The announcement was made from San Mateo, California. Access for agencies and managed service DSPs is granted through sales-assisted onboarding, with demo and access requests handled through the Buyer Hub page.

Why: According to InMobi Advertising, agency demand for direct portal access was the clearest signal from a market requirement scoping exercise conducted with agency and managed service DSP customers after Buyer Hub opened to curators. The launch places an agent on the demand-facing side of InMobi's supply chain, ten weeks after the Scope3 partnership placed one on the supply-facing side. It arrives into a category where PubMatic, Magnite and others shipped comparable agent infrastructure between December 2025 and June 2026, and where independent pricing data has so far recorded conventional buyers outperforming agents on CPM.