At IAB Tech Lab, we couldn’t be more excited about laying the foundations for bringing the efficiency and effectiveness of AI agents  in digital advertising and marketing. We’ve been paving the way for it to happen since before most people knew what Agentic was. And our goal right from the start was to deliver speed, structure, security, and trust. Because without those, there’s no agentic advertising future worth having.

The Agentic roadmap builds on a robust set of well-established core standards that already power digital advertising.

There are already widely used transaction, management, and delivery standards for advertising, such as OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, VAST, and the recently released Deals API. There are impression measurement standards, such as the Open Measurement Interface Definition (OMID)  powered by OM SDK for advertisement exposure events and the upcoming ECAPI specification for advertiser outcome events. There are privacy and regulatory frameworks such as the Global Privacy Protocol (GPP) and Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF). There are also critical taxonomies – Ad Product taxonomy, Privacy taxonomy, Content, and Audience taxonomy. Additionally, there are agentic control-plane standards, such as the recently released Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF), which defines how ML and AI based autonomous agents can interact and power real-time advertising transactions without sacrificing performance.

IAB Tech Lab is integrating these proven standards with modern protocols, including Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A), and gRPC, to support secure, machine-speed execution and scalable coordination between independent systems.

For the industry, this means faster speed-to-value. Agencies, publishers, brands, and technology providers can adopt agentic workflows more quickly, reduce integration complexity, and lower operational risk by modernizing execution rather than reinventing foundations, empowering stakeholders to lead innovation.

In 2026, IAB Tech Lab will extend these standards into the agentic execution layer through focused initiatives, including open-source reference implementations of buyer and seller agents, a neutral Model Context Protocol reference server, standardized agent profiles, Protocol Buffers, and gRPC mappings for existing specifications, and other open-source agentic tools based on industry feedback. Tech Lab is also prioritizing the development of governance,  data provenance, and transaction-integrity , along with  privacy requirements implemented by GPP and TCF. This will provide the industry with the robust technical foundations needed to implement agentic workflows quickly and safely – both for internal use and for interacting with their partners’ AI agents across the advertising ecosystem.