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How IAB Tech Lab plans to prevent agentic AI's fragmentation problem

IAB Tech Lab unveils agentic roadmap on January 6, extending OpenRTB and existing standards with modern protocols to scale AI agents without rebuilding digital advertising.

Luis Rijo

• 15 min read
IAB Tech Lab agentic AI roadmap graphic showing standards integration for digital advertising automation
IAB Tech Lab agentic AI roadmap graphic showing standards integration for digital advertising automation

The Interactive Advertising Bureau Technology Laboratory announced on January 6, 2025, a comprehensive agentic roadmap designed to scale artificial intelligence agent deployment across digital advertising without fragmenting the ecosystem through multiple incompatible protocols. The roadmap extends established industry standards including OpenRTB, AdCOM, and VAST with modern execution protocols rather than introducing entirely new technical frameworks.

According to Anthony Katsur, chief executive officer at IAB Tech Lab, the organization will make a significant engineering investment focused solely on artificial intelligence development, including dedicated development resources to expedite roadmap delivery. The announcement arrives amid substantial industry consolidation around agentic capabilities, with major advertising platforms introducing AI agents throughout fall 2025 while simultaneously raising questions about interoperability and coordination.

"Agentic execution is already part of how digital advertising operates today," Katsur stated in the January 6 announcement. "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."

The statement directly addresses mounting industry concerns about protocol proliferation. Multiple competing frameworks emerged during 2025, including the Ad Context Protocol launched October 15 with six founding members, and various proprietary implementations from major platforms. Industry experts have questioned whether additional protocols address fundamental programmatic challenges or simply create more complexity.

Building on proven infrastructure

The roadmap identifies existing transaction, management, and delivery standards that already power programmatic advertising at scale. OpenRTB facilitates real-time bidding transactions processing billions of auctions daily. AdCOM provides common object definitions across different advertising contexts. OpenDirect establishes direct programmatic buying specifications. VAST defines video ad serving templates used across connected television and digital video environments.

IAB Tech Lab released its Deal API specification on December 5, 2025, addressing manual entry and transparency gaps in curated programmatic deals. The organization continues developing measurement infrastructure through the Open Measurement ID and a pending Conversion API designed to function beyond walled garden implementations.

Privacy and regulatory frameworks receive particular emphasis in the agentic context. The Global Privacy Protocol provides consolidated privacy signaling across 14 U.S. state privacy laws enforceable at the start of 2025, with six additional state regulations expected throughout the year. The Transparency & Consent Framework establishes European privacy compliance mechanisms. Both specifications will integrate with agentic execution layers to maintain regulatory compliance as autonomous systems operate across jurisdictions.

Critical taxonomies undergird these technical specifications. The ad product taxonomy, privacy taxonomy, content taxonomy, and audience taxonomy provide standardized vocabularies enabling different systems to communicate without ambiguity. IAB Tech Lab updated its Content Taxonomy in December 2024, addressing inefficiencies in content classification and advertising placement that had persisted since version 1.0's deprecation in 2020.

The Agentic RTB Framework entered public comment on November 13, 2025, defining how large language models and autonomous agents participate in real-time advertising transactions. The framework establishes technical standards for containerized programmatic auctions designed to accommodate AI agents operating across advertising platforms without sacrificing the sub-millisecond performance requirements that characterize modern programmatic infrastructure.

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Integrating modern execution protocols

The roadmap integration extends beyond updating existing specifications to incorporate contemporary protocols enabling machine-speed execution and scalable coordination between independent systems. Model Context Protocol provides standardized interfaces for large language models to interact with external systems and data sources. Agent2Agent establishes communication standards between autonomous agents operating across different platforms. gRPC offers high-performance remote procedure calls optimized for distributed systems requiring low latency.

These protocol integrations address architectural limitations in traditional programmatic infrastructure. Current real-time bidding processes typically require several hundred milliseconds as communication travels from supply-side platforms and ad exchanges to demand-side platforms, to data vendors, and back again—often across different cloud environments and data centers.

The containerized approach proposed in the Agentic RTB Framework seeks to enhance auction efficiency by redeploying the RTB process inside unified environments where different transaction components can run closer together. Measurement vendors could function as containerized agents within demand-side platforms, identifying fraudulent impressions before bidding occurs rather than after transactions complete.

Performance architecture achieves low to sub-millisecond response times through container-based deployment dropped into host networks. Containers communicate through high-performance messaging mechanisms built on gRPC, OpenRTB Patch, and Model Context Protocol compatible with real-time bidding requirements.

"The industry gets the best of both worlds," Katsur continued in the announcement. "High-performance agentic execution combined with the interoperability, governance, and trust the market already relies on without reinventing everything."

The architectural approach contrasts with isolated platform implementations that optimize within single ecosystems but lack coordination mechanisms across the broader programmatic landscape. PubMatic launched its AgenticOS on January 5, 2026, with live campaigns running across connected television environments, demonstrating that agentic capabilities can execute at production scale when properly architected.

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Planned initiatives for 2026

IAB Tech Lab outlined specific deliverables extending these standards into agentic execution layers throughout 2026. Open-source reference implementations of buyer and seller agents will provide concrete examples demonstrating how autonomous systems should interact with programmatic infrastructure while maintaining compliance with established specifications.

A neutral Model Context Protocol reference server will offer standardized methods for AI agents to access contextual information, identity signals, and reinforcement data without requiring custom integration work for each platform relationship. Standardized agent profiles will establish consistent identity and capability declarations enabling different systems to understand what functions particular agents can perform.

Protocol Buffers and gRPC mappings for existing specifications will modernize data serialization and communication patterns while maintaining semantic compatibility with current OpenRTB and AdCOM definitions. Other open-source agentic tools will emerge based on industry feedback gathered through working group participation and public comment periods.

The organization prioritizes development of trust, provenance, measurement, and transaction-integrity signals with continued alignment to Global Privacy Protocol and Transparency & Consent Framework requirements. These capabilities address fundamental concerns about autonomous system behavior in environments where human oversight occurs at higher abstraction levels than traditional programmatic operations.

Industry stakeholders provided statements supporting the interoperability-focused approach. Ryan McConville, executive vice president and chief product officer for advertising platforms and operations at NBCUniversal Advertising & Partnerships, stated: "The IAB and IAB Tech Lab have always been incredible leaders in their focus on interoperability, giving the industry a common foundation to scale responsibly. At NBCUniversal, we believe that interoperability is essential to maintaining performance while unlocking the next phase of automation, and we look forward to continued collaboration."

George Panagopoulos, chief technology officer at Experian Marketing Services, added: "Scale only works when interoperability is real. This roadmap makes it clear how agentic execution can expand without sacrificing control or transparency."

Nishant Khatri, executive vice president of product management at PubMatic, stated: "Agentic advertising only scales when intent, execution, and governance evolve together. IAB Tech Lab's roadmap shows how agentic execution can be integrated into the existing digital advertising foundation, accelerating adoption while preserving interoperability across the ecosystem."

Ray Ghanbari, chief technology officer at Index Exchange, emphasized: "Our multi-party digital advertising ecosystem operates best when we all embrace, improve, and extend the transparency and interoperability standards that enable our industry. Tech Lab's Agentic Roadmap builds on this proven model, extending transparency and interoperability to service-to-agent and agentic transactions as well."

The statements reflect recognition that agentic capabilities pose existential questions for traditional programmatic platform business models. Analysis published July 21, 2025, by Ari Paparo, founder and chief executive officer of Marketecture Media, argued that autonomous AI systems could automate campaign setup, targeting, and optimization functions currently handled by demand-side platforms, potentially eliminating the centralized role traditionally occupied by those platforms.

Education and adoption infrastructure

IAB Tech Lab scheduled a public webinar for January 28, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time titled "Reviewing the Agentic AI Standards Roadmap." The webinar will provide technical overview of the roadmap, the standards being extended, and how agentic execution will be applied across different advertising contexts and use cases.

Beginning February 12, 2026, the organization will launch monthly in-person Agentic AI Boot Camps and workshops at the IAB Ad Lab. Sessions will run from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time on the second Thursday of each month, providing hands-on education and practical guidance for implementing agentic workflows using open industry standards.

The educational infrastructure addresses knowledge gaps that could impede adoption even when technical specifications achieve maturity. Traditional programmatic advertising requires deep expertise across multiple domains including auction theory, data management, creative optimization, fraud detection, and regulatory compliance. Agentic systems operating across these domains require practitioners to understand both the underlying programmatic mechanics and the additional complexities introduced by autonomous decision-making.

The Container Project Working Group developing the Agentic RTB Framework includes participants from Amazon Ads, Index Exchange, OpenX, The Trade Desk, Netflix, Yahoo, Paramount, Optable, HUMAN Security, Magnite, PubMatic, WPP Media, and Basis Technologies according to participant documentation. This cross-platform representation suggests willingness among major industry players to coordinate on technical standards even as they compete on implementation and commercial offerings.

However, notable absences from various agentic protocol initiatives have raised questions about whether consensus exists across the entire ecosystem. Analysis of Ad Context Protocol adoption noted that major platforms including Google, Amazon, The Trade Desk, and Microsoft had not signed up for that October 15 initiative, potentially creating more fragmentation through new proprietary approaches rather than solving existing coordination problems.

Market context and competitive dynamics

The roadmap announcement occurs amid substantial industry investment momentum in agentic artificial intelligence. McKinsey data indicates that $1.1 billion in equity investment flowed into agentic AI during 2024, while job postings related to the technology increased 985 percent from 2023 to 2024 according to McKinsey's Technology Trends Outlook 2025.

Major platforms accelerated deployment of autonomous capabilities throughout late 2025. Amazon unified its DSP and sponsored ads console on November 10, 2025, launching AI agents for campaign management the following day while extending its Creative Agent to television formats. Google made its Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor available to all English-language accounts on November 12, 2025. StackAdapt launched Ivy on July 9, 2025, an artificial intelligence-powered assistant integrated directly into its programmatic advertising platform.

These platform-specific implementations demonstrate that agentic capabilities deliver tangible operational benefits when properly deployed. The question confronting the industry centers on whether isolated platform optimizations can address systemic programmatic challenges or whether coordination across multiple platforms and stakeholders becomes necessary to realize agentic potential at ecosystem scale.

Transparency concerns particularly complicate agentic adoption. Research published in 2023 found that only 36 percent of post-transaction programmatic budgets reached valid, viewable, measurable impressions. The Association of National Advertisers conducted a similar investigation, examining metadata on 16.4 billion media impressions from seven major advertisers. The ANA found that on average, 42 percent of each programmatic dollar was spent on "nonworking media" meaning it went toward technology or agency fees rather than actual advertising placement.

Industry debate continues about whether technology protocols can address business incentives that reward opacity and intermediation. Pavel Medvedev, who builds programmatic in-housing solutions, argued in December 2025 LinkedIn discussion that "if we want a cleaner ecosystem, the path is obvious. Control beats greed every time," positioning ownership and accountability as prerequisites for meaningful improvement rather than technical standards alone.

The timing coincides with significant market disruptions affecting transparency in programmatic advertising. Microsoft announced on May 14, 2025, that it would discontinue Microsoft Invest (formerly Xandr, originally AppNexus) effective February 28, 2026, removing one of the industry's most transparent DSP options from the market. According to Microsoft Advertising Corporate Vice President Kya Sainsbury-Carter, the company cited incompatibility between traditional DSP models and their vision for "conversational, personalized, and agentic" advertising futures.

Technical implementation considerations

The roadmap success depends on resolving architectural tensions between centralized control and distributed execution. Traditional programmatic infrastructure concentrates decision-making in demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms that maintain comprehensive views of available inventory, audience data, and campaign objectives. Agentic systems potentially distribute these decisions across multiple autonomous agents operating with partial information and localized objectives.

Swivel launched agentic transactions on November 16, 2025, establishing direct connections between buyer and seller artificial intelligence agents that bypass traditional programmatic bidstream infrastructure. The implementation demonstrates technical feasibility of agent-to-agent coordination but raises questions about how bad actors might exploit these direct connections without the verification layers that traditional programmatic infrastructure provides.

Questions about fraud prevention surfaced in LinkedIn discussions following the Swivel announcement. June Cheung asked how the process prevents dishonest sellers from having agents misdeclare information "just like they have been mis-declaring anything in the bid request for countless years and getting away with it." The comment highlighted ongoing transparency concerns that persist despite multiple technical specifications intended to establish trust and verification.

The architectural challenge extends beyond fraud detection to measurement accuracy, frequency capping, competitive separation, and attribution modeling—all functions that require coordination across multiple platforms and consistent data handling practices. IAB Tech Lab's Ad Creative ID Framework addresses some of these coordination requirements by providing persistent identifiers for advertisements across delivery environments, gaining support from major registries including Ad-id.org in the United States, Auditel in Italy, ARPP in France, and Clearcast in the United Kingdom.

Privacy compliance adds additional complexity layers. The Global Privacy Protocol must signal user consent preferences to autonomous agents operating across jurisdictions with different regulatory requirements. GDPR enforcement in Europe, CCPA compliance in California, and varied state-level requirements across the United States create a patchwork of compliance obligations that agentic systems must navigate without human oversight of individual transactions.

Live event streaming presents particularly challenging agentic scenarios. The organization acknowledges specific challenges in delivering advertisements during live streamed events in its 2025 technical standards roadmap announced January 29, leading to development of new OpenRTB signaling protocols and implementation guidance for programmatic advertising in these time-sensitive environments where forecasting, concurrent streams management, and real-time optimization occur simultaneously.

Competitive positioning and market adoption

The roadmap positions IAB Tech Lab as coordinator rather than competitor in the agentic landscape, extending rather than replacing existing platform capabilities. This approach contrasts with proprietary protocol initiatives that position particular vendors as gatekeepers to agentic functionality.

However, adoption requires participation from platforms that process the majority of programmatic advertising budgets. The Trade Desk, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft collectively control substantial market share across demand-side and supply-side infrastructure. Their commitment to open standards versus proprietary implementations will largely determine whether the roadmap achieves industry-wide interoperability or becomes one option among multiple incompatible approaches.

The Trade Desk launched OpenAds platform on October 2, 2025, after Prebid.org removed transaction identifier functionality, demonstrating the company's strategy of building proprietary solutions rather than adopting industry-wide protocols it does not control. This pattern suggests that major platforms will engage with open standards when they align with commercial objectives but will pursue independent approaches when standardization constrains competitive differentiation.

IAB Tech Lab previously challenged Prebid.org's transaction ID implementation on August 27, 2025, declaring that modifications materially violated OpenRTB specifications and risked "undermining the integrity and consistency of open technical standards." That enforcement action demonstrates the organization's willingness to defend technical specifications against implementations that compromise interoperability, though its authority remains limited to industry consensus rather than regulatory mandate.

The organization completed 79 initiatives in 2024, developed with input from over 800 member companies. The 2025 roadmap outlined 31 new specifications or updates addressing privacy regulations, data handling, and streaming media challenges. This work continues through established working group structures that provide industry participation mechanisms in standards development, focusing on specific technical challenges across digital advertising sectors including privacy technology implementation, measurement standards, and programmatic trading protocols.

Connected television advertising particularly benefits from standardization efforts. IAB Tech Lab published standardized guidelines for six CTV ad formats on December 11, 2025, including pause ads, menu ads, squeezeback formats, overlay ads, in-scene insertions, and screensaver ads—formats that exist outside traditional commercial breaks and have proliferated across streaming platforms without consistent implementation standards. Connected television advertising spending approached $33.35 billion in 2025, with 72 percent of marketers planning increased programmatic investment according to industry surveys.

Commerce media represents another growth sector requiring standardization. IAB Tech Lab finalized updates to the OpenRTB specification on January 24, 2025, transforming how product listing ads are traded programmatically. The extension introduces a new prodfeed object within the bidrequest extension, addressing significant gaps in the commerce media ecosystem that had operated without fundamental industry standards.

Strategic implications for marketers

The agentic roadmap carries substantial implications for marketing professionals allocating programmatic advertising budgets and building technology infrastructure to support campaign execution. Platform consolidation continues as major players develop proprietary agentic capabilities while simultaneously participating in standards development, creating uncertainty about which technical approaches will achieve market dominance.

Agencies and brands face decisions about whether to build agentic capabilities on open standards that promise interoperability or proprietary platforms that offer integrated functionality but potential lock-in. The education infrastructure IAB Tech Lab is building through webinars and boot camps provides resources for technical teams evaluating these options, though competitive dynamics may ultimately prove more determinative than technical merit.

LiveRamp introduced agentic orchestration capabilities on October 1, 2025, enabling autonomous AI agents to access identity resolution, segmentation, activation, measurement, clean rooms, and partner networks through governed APIs. The implementation demonstrates that data collaboration platforms can provide agentic access to their complete tool suites, potentially positioning themselves as coordination layers between autonomous agents and multiple advertising platforms.

Adobe launched its Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator on September 10, 2025, for managing agents across Adobe and third-party ecosystems, suggesting that enterprise marketing platforms will increasingly serve as control planes coordinating multiple specialized agents rather than monolithic systems executing all functions internally.

The architectural shift from centralized platforms to distributed agent ecosystems potentially reduces dependency on any single vendor while simultaneously increasing complexity of integration and coordination. Marketing organizations must develop capabilities to manage multiple autonomous agents, establish governance frameworks defining acceptable agent behavior, and maintain oversight of systems operating at machine speed across numerous platforms simultaneously.

Measurement and attribution challenges intensify in agentic environments. Traditional marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution already struggle with fragmentation across digital and offline channels, walled garden platforms that restrict data sharing, and privacy regulations that limit tracking capabilities. Autonomous agents executing campaigns across these fragmented environments without centralized visibility could further complicate performance measurement unless standardized signals enable cross-platform coordination.

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Summary

Who: IAB Technology Laboratory, the global digital advertising technical standard-setting body led by CEO Anthony Katsur, announced the agentic roadmap with support from industry stakeholders including NBCUniversal, Experian Marketing Services, PubMatic, and Index Exchange. The Container Project Working Group developing related specifications includes participants from Amazon Ads, Index Exchange, OpenX, The Trade Desk, Netflix, Yahoo, Paramount, and other major advertising technology companies.

What: The agentic roadmap outlines how the digital advertising industry can scale agentic buying and selling by extending established standards including OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, VAST, and Deal API with modern protocols such as Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent, and gRPC. IAB Tech Lab will make significant engineering investment focused solely on AI development and deliver open-source reference implementations, neutral Model Context Protocol reference servers, standardized agent profiles, and other agentic tools throughout 2026.

When: The announcement occurred on January 6, 2025. A public webinar is scheduled for January 28, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time. Monthly in-person Agentic AI Boot Camps begin February 12, 2026, continuing on the second Thursday of each month from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

Where: The roadmap applies across the global digital advertising ecosystem, affecting agencies, publishers, brands, and technology providers operating programmatic advertising infrastructure. Educational sessions will occur at the IAB Ad Lab, with the webinar accessible online for global participation.

Why: The roadmap addresses industry fragmentation concerns as multiple competing agentic protocols emerged during 2025 while major platforms developed proprietary implementations. By extending proven standards rather than introducing entirely new technical frameworks, IAB Tech Lab aims to enable faster speed-to-value, reduce integration complexity, lower operational risk, and preserve interoperability and trust that the market already relies on. The approach responds to transparency challenges that resulted in only 36 percent of programmatic budgets reaching valid impressions according to 2023 research, while accommodating the $1.1 billion in equity investment that flowed into agentic AI during 2024 and 985 percent increase in related job postings.

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