IAB Tech Lab has released its Agentic Roadmap showing how the industry can scale buying and selling by extending established standards and high-performance protocols.
The roadmap outlines a practical path to enable secure, interoperable agentic execution across digital advertising without rebuilding the market’s foundational languages.
“Agentic execution is already part of how digital advertising operates today,” said IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur.
“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.”
Adding modern protocols
The Agentic Roadmap builds on a set of well-established core standards that already power digital advertising.
There are already transaction, management, and delivery standards for advertising, measurement standards, privacy and regulatory frameworks, taxonomies and agentic control-plane standards.
IAB Tech Lab is combining proven standards with modern protocols, including Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent, and gRPC, to support secure, machine-speed execution.
The approach allows agencies, publishers, brands and technology providers to adopt agentic workflows more quickly, reducing integration complexity and operational risk.
“Scale only works when interoperability is real,” said Experian Marketing Services chief technology officer George Panagopoulos.
“This roadmap makes it clear how agentic execution can expand without sacrificing control or transparency.”
Agentic initiatives planned for 2026
Tech Lab will build on these standards with open-source buyer and seller agents, a Model Context Protocol server, standardised agent profiles, and gRPC, Protocol Buffers, mappings and other tools based on industry feedback.
IAB Tech Lab will host a public webinar, Reviewing the Agentic AI Standards Roadmap, on 28 January, outlining the roadmap, the standards being extended and how agentic execution will be applied across digital advertising.
In February, there will also launch a series of in-person Agentic AI Boot Camps and workshops, providing hands-on guidance for implementing agentic workflows using open industry standards.