IAB Tech Lab Unveils Agentic Roadmap for Digital Advertising

Roadmap Details How Open, Interoperable Standards Are Being Extended With Modern Protocols to Power Agentic Systems at Scale

NEW YORK, Jan. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standard-setting body, today 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 organization 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."

Updating Industry-Embraced Standards

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.

Adding Modern Protocols

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."

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.

Agentic Initiatives Planned for 2026

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.

"IAB and IAB Tech Lab have always been incredible leaders in their focus on interoperability, giving the industry a common foundation to scale responsibly," said Ryan McConville, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Advertising Platforms & Operations, NBCUniversal Advertising & Partnerships. "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."

"Agentic advertising only scales when intent, execution, and governance evolve together," said Nishant Khatri, EVP of Product Management at PubMatic. "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."

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

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.

Additionally, beginning February 12, 2026, IAB Tech Lab will launch a series of in-person Agentic AI Boot Camps and workshops, starting at the Ad Lab. The sessions will be held from 4:00–6:00 p.m. ET and will continue on a monthly basis on the second Thursday of each month, providing hands-on education and practical guidance for implementing agentic workflows using open industry standards.

As agentic execution advances across digital advertising, IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Roadmap, driven by the Agentic Task Force, provides a clear and reliable path to scale intelligent systems, ensuring interoperability and stability while fostering industry confidence.

To learn more about the Agentic Roadmap and what's coming next, register for our upcoming webinar, and join us for a series of hands-on workshops designed to help the industry put these standards into practice.

About IAB Technology Laboratory
Established in 2014, the IAB Technology Laboratory (Tech Lab) is a non-profit consortium that engages a member community globally to develop foundational technology and standards that enable growth and trust in the digital media ecosystem. Comprised of digital publishers, ad technology firms, agencies, marketers, and other member companies, IAB Tech Lab focuses on solutions for brand safety and ad fraud; identity, data, and consumer privacy; ad experiences and measurement; and programmatic effectiveness. Its work includes the OpenRTB real-time bidding protocol, ads.txt anti-fraud specification, Open Measurement SDK for viewability and verification, VAST video specification, and Project Rearc initiative for privacy-centric addressability. Board members/companies are listed at https://iabtechlab.com/about-the-iab-tech-lab/tech-lab-leadership/. For more information, please visit https://iabtechlab.com.

SOURCE IAB Tech Lab