IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standard-setting body, has announced the release of its Agentic Roadmap, outlining how the industry can scale agentic buying and selling by extending established standards with new agentic and high-performance protocols. The roadmap defines a practical path to enable secure, interoperable agentic execution across digital advertising without rebuilding the market’s foundational languages. To ensure Tech Lab can deliver on the roadmap in an expedited manner, the organisation is making a significant engineering investment focused solely on AI development, including new development resources.
“Agentic execution is already part of how digital advertising operates today,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. “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 Agentic Roadmap builds on a robust set of well-established core standards that already power digital advertising. There are already transaction, management, and delivery standards for advertising, such as OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, VAST, and the recently released Deal API. There are measurement standards, such as the Open Measurement ID and the pending Conversion API. There are privacy and regulatory frameworks such as the Global Privacy Protocol (GPP) and Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF). There are also critical existing taxonomies, such as the ad product taxonomy, content, and audience taxonomies.
Additionally, there are agentic control-plane standards, such as the recently released Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF), which defines how large language models and autonomous agents can participate in real-time advertising transactions without sacrificing performance.
IAB Tech Lab is integrating these proven standards with modern protocols, including Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent, and gRPC, to support secure, machine-speed execution and scalable coordination between independent systems.
“The industry gets the best of both worlds,” Katsur continued. “High-performance agentic execution combined with the interoperability, governance, and trust the market already relies on, without reinventing everything.”
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 trust, provenance, measurement, and transaction-integrity signals, with continued alignment with GPP and TCF.
Ryan McConville, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Advertising Platforms & Operations, NBCUniversal Advertising & Partnerships, commented: “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.”
“Scale only works when interoperability is real,” said George Panagopoulos, Chief Technology Officer, Experian Marketing Services. “This roadmap makes it clear how agentic execution can expand without sacrificing control or transparency.”
To support industry understanding and adoption of the Agentic Roadmap, IAB Tech Lab will host a public webinar on January 28, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. ET titled “Reviewing the Agentic AI Standards Roadmap.” The webinar will provide an overview of the roadmap, the standards being extended, and how agentic execution will be applied across digital advertising.
To learn more about the Agentic Roadmap, register for the upcoming webinar here.
