Scope3 confirmed last week it reduced engineering and sales staff five months after previous layoffs as the Brian O'Kelley-led startup pursues agentic media trading transformation.
Scope3 confirmed last week it cut engineering and sales staff just five months after implementing commercial team reductions in August 2025. The sustainability-focused adtech company declined to specify how many employees lost positions in the February layoffs.
The company confirmed in a statement that it made "further adjustments" to its "commercial and engineering teams to align with market demand," according to an Adweek report published February 5, 2026.
One impacted employee told Adweek they learned about losing their job during a brief call with their manager last week. The news came as a surprise.
Two former Scope3 employees, speaking anonymously, told Adweek that several colleagues recently departed the company voluntarily as well.
The workforce reductions arrive as Scope3 pursues a fundamental transformation from carbon emissions measurement to what CEO and co-founder Brian O'Kelley calls "agentic advertising." The company launched this strategic direction in March 2025 with its Agentic Media Platform, described as an adaptable operating system enabling organizations to build, integrate, or deploy agents that execute autonomous decisions at the impression level.
O'Kelley, who previously founded AppNexus, has positioned Scope3 at the forefront of an emerging category that uses artificial intelligence agents to automate media buying decisions. The company's transformation reflects broader industry trends. The Interactive Advertising Bureau projects that 66% of advertisers now prioritize agentic AI for campaign execution, according to research released January 28, 2026.
The shift requires more than product development. It demands fundamental restructuring of how Scope3 serves clients. Tim Collier, who became chief commercial officer in August 2025 during the first round of layoffs, explained the challenge then: "As we think about building and owning the agentic advertising category, it requires us to totally rethink how we set up the commercial structure of the business. This isn't about taking a ton of programmatic players and putting an AI on top of it. That doesn't work."
Scope3's spokesperson told Adweek: "We remain focused on building the agent-to-agent media infrastructure that brands need as the industry transforms."
As of late 2024, Scope3 employed over 100 people globally, according to a blog post by O'Kelley. That figure predates both the August 2025 and February 2026 layoffs, making current staffing levels unclear.
The August layoffs primarily affected the commercial team responsible for generating revenue through product sales and partnerships with brands, agencies, and adtech providers. Despite those reductions, Scope3 continued hiring in product and engineering departments it deemed critical for scaling AI offerings. LinkedIn showed seven open positions across marketing, accounting, and engineering at the time.
The latest cuts affecting both engineering and sales teams suggest more comprehensive cost management than the August restructuring, which concentrated on commercial operations while maintaining technical development capacity.
Scope3's product transformation extends beyond its flagship carbon emissions data service that initially built the company's reputation. The March 2025 Agentic Media Platform launch introduced capabilities fundamentally different from sustainability measurement.
The Brand Standards product enables marketers to construct custom agents for brand safety and suitability decisions, competing directly with established verification providers DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. These AI-powered systems analyze content where advertisements appear, build brand-specific content libraries, and make autonomous blocking decisions aligned with company values and guidelines.
The platform demonstrated concrete performance in agency deployments. Draft Digital's use of Scope3's AI agents on Meta's platform for a lottery client identified that 25% of advertising spending appeared alongside gambling content, violating lottery guidelines, according to Collier's August disclosure.
Meta certified Scope3 as a business partner in March 2025, deploying custom AI agents for precision content blocking across Facebook and Instagram feeds. The integration enables brands to implement customized content blocking mechanisms aligned with specific standards and values.
Amazon launched an AI brand safety integration with Scope3 through Amazon DSP earlier in 2025, offering custom AI models and agentic decisioning for programmatic campaigns.
O'Kelley has championed standardization efforts through the Ad Context Protocol, launched October 15, 2025, with founding members including Scope3, Yahoo, PubMatic, Swivel, Triton Digital, and Optable. The protocol provides a unified interface allowing AI agents to discover inventory, compare pricing, and activate campaigns across different advertising platforms without requiring custom integration work for each system.
The protocol's reception has been mixed. Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, questioned whether another protocol addresses fundamental industry problems. "What we don't need is another industry trade group," Katsur told The Current in October. He noted that IAB Tech Lab operates open-source structures where anyone can work, including Ads.Cert. "We already have solved some of the problems that this AdCP initiative is trying to."
Fraud researcher Augustine Fou cautioned that "more automation means less transparency," warning that agents can still act on behalf of people with bad incentives. Lindsay Rowntree, chief operating officer at ExchangeWire, identified transparency as a critical unresolved issue, stating that agentic AI represents "a giant black box."
Despite industry debate, several platforms have deployed AdCP-compatible infrastructure. Magnite built a seller agent into SpringServe during December 2025, testing AI-driven advertising transactions with Scope3 as buyer agent partner. The company announced on January 6, 2026, that it embedded seller agent capabilities within SpringServe to support the protocol.
PubMatic launched AgenticOS on January 5, positioning the infrastructure as the first operating system built specifically for autonomous advertising execution across premium digital environments. The announcement arrived alongside live campaign deployments already executing across connected television and video inventory.
Yahoo, another AdCP founding member, has expanded its commitments. The company integrated Scope3 for carbon-neutral media through private marketplace deals in January 2023, establishing a relationship that predates the agentic pivot. Yahoo DSP launched agentic AI capabilities on January 6, 2026, enabling advertisers to automate campaign setup, troubleshooting, and optimization through natural language.
The workforce reductions occur as advertising platforms consolidated infrastructure around AI agents during late 2025 and early 2026. Amazon, Google, and IAB Tech Lab accelerated autonomous campaign tools in November 2025, compressing months of infrastructure development into a single week.
Amazon unified its DSP and sponsored ads console on November 10, launching AI agents for campaign management the following day. Google made its Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor available to all English-language accounts on November 12. The IAB Tech Lab introduced its Agentic RTB Framework on November 13, establishing containerized auction standards designed to accommodate autonomous buying systems.
This acceleration creates pressure on specialized players like Scope3 to demonstrate distinct value propositions. Industry veteran David Kohl warned on October 15, 2025, that Ad Context Protocol represents premature focus on automation tools before addressing fundamental structural issues, arguing that building agentic infrastructure without clear goals risks repeating mistakes that created today's dysfunctional programmatic supply chain.
Scope3's position differs from major platforms with diversified revenue streams and established customer bases. The company operates at the intersection of sustainability measurement and brand safety verification, attempting to establish leadership in agentic advertising while competing against larger verification providers and platform-native AI tools.
Scope3's repeated layoffs reflect broader instability across advertising technology companies. The Trade Desk eliminated 39 positions during an all-hands meeting on December 17, 2025, almost exactly one year after the company implemented what CEO Jeff Green described as "the biggest reorganization" in The Trade Desk's history.
Pinterest cut 780 jobs on January 27, 2026, approximately 15% of its workforce, while emphasizing strategic resource reallocation toward artificial intelligence rather than financial distress. Shares tumbled nearly 10% following the announcement.
According to data tracked by Layoffs.fyi cited in Reuters reporting, more than 123,000 employees were laid off from 269 technology companies in 2025. However, most documented layoffs involved companies explicitly citing AI automation as justification for workforce reductions, creating questions about whether these explanations represent genuine strategic shifts or convenient narratives for planned cost cutting.
The pattern suggests industry-wide challenges as companies navigate transitions from traditional programmatic workflows to AI-powered systems. Microsoft announced in May 2025 to discontinue Microsoft Invest (formerly Xandr) effective February 28, 2026, explicitly citing incompatibility between traditional DSP models and visions for "conversational, personalized, and agentic" advertising futures.
Scope3's agentic capabilities operate through partnerships spanning major advertising platforms. The company's existing relationships include Omnicom, Butler/Till, Draft Digital, Meta, and Amazon.
The Brand Standards solution employs a three-step methodology beginning with comprehensive content analysis. The system tracks, reviews, and classifies content where ads appear on Facebook and Instagram, building a content library specific to each advertiser's campaigns. Advertisers can construct customized decisioning systems that automatically implement blocking rules based on brand values, positioning, target audience, and business objectives.
The platform provides complete transparency through what Scope3 terms "provenance." The system offers insights into each piece of content that appears alongside advertisements, allowing marketers to make adjustments that refine the model.
"Agents are constantly learning and are transparent about the decisions they make," according to Scope3. This approach gives advertisers control over brand safety parameters while maintaining optimal reach and campaign performance.
Beyond content blocking, partnerships include comprehensive media quality measurement tools. These measurements provide insights into viewability rates, invalid traffic detection, and ad exposure metrics for Facebook and Instagram campaigns. The reporting system delivers standard viewability data and "Ad Exposure," which Scope3 describes as "an advanced metric that surpasses traditional viewability, accounting for social platform specifics like infinite scrolling."
Scope3 built its initial reputation as a sustainability-focused platform before expanding into traditional ad verification. The company aligned its emissions measurement platform with GMSF v1.2 on October 1, 2025, offering three framework options for advertisers. The Global Media Sustainability Framework serves as the industry standard for emissions reporting across advertising and media.
The November 4, 2024 acquisition of Adloox expanded capabilities in ad verification and brand safety solutions, consolidating measurement tools under unified corporate branding. Google updated Display & Video 360 in July 2025 to reflect the acquisition, rebranding all references from "Adloox" to "Scope3" across the platform interface, API documentation, reporting systems, and Help Center materials.
The company also expanded carbon measurement capabilities to include digital out-of-home advertising in December 2023, incorporating an impression multiplier representing the average number of people within proximity of a given screen to account for DOOH being a one-to-many format.
Adform's March 2024 integration with Scope3 provided a measurement-only option for its Adform Carbon Reduction feature, putting data-driven insights into advertisers' hands without requiring immediate implementation of carbon reduction strategies.
These sustainability products remain active alongside the newer agentic offerings, though the company's strategic emphasis has shifted toward autonomous advertising execution.
The agentic advertising transformation faces substantial skepticism from industry observers. IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur, speaking on the AdTechGod podcast December 29, 2025, characterized the current discourse as reaching "a fevered pitch" of hype. Conversations with holding companies, publishers, and adtech firms consistently involve stakeholders claiming they want to "do something agentic" without clear definitions.
"I want to do an agentic CTV buy. Okay, what is an agentic CTV buy? I don't know. I was hoping you tell me," Katsur said, describing typical exchanges. He warned that protocols cannot solve problems caused by misaligned business incentives and bad actors, even as he acknowledged substance exists in agentic capabilities beyond typical industry trends.
The implementation challenges extend beyond technology to fundamental business model questions. Analysis published July 21, 2025 by Ari Paparo, founder and CEO 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.
These concerns matter for Scope3's positioning. The company operates as both a buyer agent participant in emerging protocols and a provider of agentic infrastructure that other organizations can deploy. Whether the market consolidates around a few dominant agent platforms or fragments across specialized providers remains uncertain.
Scope3's workforce adjustments arrive during a period of significant infrastructure investment across the advertising industry. The Interactive Advertising Bureau projects US advertising spend will climb 9.5% in 2026, accelerated by major cyclical events and the decisive shift toward agentic AI systems, according to research released January 28.
Two-thirds of advertisers now concentrate on agentic AI for ad buying and campaign execution, according to IAB's findings. The autonomous systems plan, activate, and optimize campaigns with speed and scale that manual workflows cannot match.
However, this growth creates competitive dynamics that may not favor all participants equally. Major platforms with established customer relationships, diversified revenue streams, and substantial engineering resources appear positioned to capture market share as advertising automation advances.
Smaller specialized companies face pressure to demonstrate clear differentiation. Scope3's combination of sustainability measurement, brand safety verification, and agentic infrastructure represents an attempt to occupy a distinct market position, but the commercial viability remains to be proven through customer adoption and revenue growth.
The February layoffs affecting both commercial and engineering teams suggest market demand may not be developing as quickly as anticipated, or that operational efficiency requires more aggressive cost management than previously recognized.
O'Kelley's track record includes founding AppNexus, which sold to AT&T for $1.6 billion in 2018 before being rebranded as Xandr. That success provides credibility but doesn't guarantee outcomes in fundamentally different market conditions where platform-native AI capabilities compete directly against third-party solutions.
The company's spokesperson statement about remaining "focused on building the agent-to-agent media infrastructure that brands need" signals continued commitment to the strategic direction despite workforce reductions. Whether Scope3 can execute that vision with a smaller team while major platforms deploy competing capabilities represents the central question for the company's future.
Who: Scope3, an advertising technology company led by CEO and co-founder Brian O'Kelley, reduced engineering and sales staff in its second workforce reduction within five months. Affected employees learned about layoffs through brief manager calls last week.
What: The company confirmed making "further adjustments" to commercial and engineering teams to align with market demand, declining to specify the number of positions eliminated. The reductions follow August 2025 layoffs that primarily affected the commercial team as Scope3 pivots from carbon emissions measurement to agentic advertising infrastructure.
When: The layoffs occurred in late January or early February 2026, with Adweek reporting the news on February 5. The workforce reduction came five months after August 28, 2025 layoffs and during a period when Scope3 actively participates in agentic advertising protocol development and platform testing.
Where: The global workforce reductions affect Scope3 operations across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions where the company serves brands, agencies, and platform partners including Meta, Amazon, Yahoo, PubMatic, and Magnite.
Why: Scope3 restructures to support its transformation from sustainability measurement to agentic advertising platform operator, building agent-to-agent media infrastructure as the advertising industry shifts toward AI-powered autonomous campaign execution. The company faces competitive pressure from major platforms deploying native AI capabilities and must demonstrate market demand justifies its specialized positioning combining sustainability, brand safety, and agentic automation.
