Agentic ad buying has made strides through the first half of this year to fulfill its promise of saving marketers time and money when planning campaigns.

Though the technology still has plenty to prove, large agencies and publishers are forging shared standards to make those workflows reliable, meeting advertiser demand without sacrificing trust.

“Agents are the buzz of the marketing world… [and there's an] effort going on to automate ad buying and selling using agents,” said our analyst Yory Wurmser in an episode of "Behind the Numbers." “I think as they come online, we're going to see that type of selling and buying take off.”

Demand and trust

Even in this early stage of agentic ad buying, advertisers are already keen to reap the benefits.

• 66% of advertisers plan to focus more on agentic ad buying this year, according to IAB’s survey taken from November 2025 to January 2026.
• And 78% plan to focus more on using genAI in media campaigns, per IAB.

But trust is needed in order to fully embrace agentic processes. The top two concerns worldwide AI leaders have with moving agents from pilot to production are security and data privacy (59%) and accuracy and reliability (55%), according to a January 2026 report from Dynatrace.

“What’s changing in 2026 is how AI is being deployed, not just as a tool but as an intelligent partner coordinating campaigns in real time,” said Chris Bruderle, vice president of industry insights and content strategy at IAB, in a release. “Agentic AI is moving us toward fully autonomous systems that can plan, activate, and optimize with speed and scale.”

Agents and standards

Reliable agentic workflows for ad campaigns need shared standards between agencies and publishers, pulling key partners in the ad supply chain together to develop agentic capabilities.

Last week, WPP Media announced the development of a new agentic initiative, Buyer Agent for Video, which will be available through the WPP Open platform. The initial aim is to enable agentic buying for linear TV, connected TV (CTV), and premium video.

Agentic workflows must be interoperable with publishers, where campaigns are activated, to link planning and buying. That's why WPP Media has partnered with a number of publishers and organizations to launch this initiative, including NBCUniversal, Disney Advertising, Netflix, IAB, and more.

WPP Media is also working with partners to establish its Agent Standards Initiative, aiming to reduce the risk of agent-to-agent exchanges from agency to DSP and publisher. This way, advertisers can be more confident that sensitive information they share with agents, including information about audiences, campaign strategy, and planning logic, are governed by all agents within the chain.

"The future of media buying isn't just automated, it's intelligent, interoperable, and outcome-driven,” said Jamie Power, Disney Advertising’s senior vice president of addressable sales, in a release about the WPP Media partnership. “The real opportunity is giving buyer and seller agents a common foundation to make better decisions, faster, while preserving the trust and accountability premium advertising demands.”

Publishers activating AI

Besides full agent-to-agent workflows, advertisers can also leverage a publisher’s AI-driven insights, which can match them with optimal ad placements.

This week, Omnicom announced it is the first agency partner with Netflix’s program to bring AI-powered data to relevant, personalized ads on Netflix.

"This collaboration with Netflix creates an enhanced framework for how brands can connect audience intelligence with creative transformation in real time,” said Megan Pagliuca, chief product officer at Omnicom Media, in a release.

Through ad tech partner Acxiom, Omnicom Media will provide advertiser-defined audience segments with a brand brief. Netflix then matches those audience segments with its AI engines to help build personalized ads.

For a more agent-driven process, Warner Bros. Discovery announced it is rebuilding its core ad infrastructure using autonomous AI agents that will help plan, forecast, and make its US linear and streaming inventory available in a single platform. Unified media planning, automated pricing, and other features will begin rolling out in the second half of the year.

Protocol pros

Large agencies and publishers deploying massive campaigns lend confidence that agent-to-agent execution is tested and proven. But what lets these workflows take root is a shared protocol that ensures agents can communicate.

Recently, French pharmaceutical company Pierre Fabre Group piloted a US CTV campaign for Eau Thermale Avène skincare using an agentic workflow established through a partnership between Swivel’s publisher-side seller agents and Olyzon’s buyer agents.

Swivel and Olyzon’s agents use Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), a protocol developed for LLM-based agents. Another protocol was established by IAB TechLab, ARTF (Agentic Real Time Framework), which supports agents in real-time ad bidding and helps host platforms maintain control of data.

Through the adoption of standards and protocols, AI agents at agencies, publishers, and ad tech partners can work together to match ad opportunities with advertiser’s campaign parameters and goals.

“The standards…provide a common language for agents to talk to each other,” said Wursmer. “So part of that is structuring the data itself in these different sources. And part of it is creating a unified API so they can talk directly to each other.”

When these agent-to-agent workflows are up and running, more of the traditionally manual planning processes will be automated, while keeping the human in the loop, especially for high-cost decisions.