• by Laurie Sullivan , January 6, 2026

IAB Tech Lab Tuuesday announced an roadmap for agentic that builds on existing standards, intended to provide a secure, interoperable approach for digital advertising.

The idea is to support all companies participating across the advertising industry and to expand existing standards with new protocols and technologies without sacrificing controls or transparency.

“Agentic execution is already part of how digital advertising operates today,” stated Anthony Katsur, CEO at IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical entity that sets standards. “Open, interoperable standards are what make that possible, and our focus is on scaling it responsibly.”

Katsur believes it is necessary to build on an existing foundation the industry shares, rather than introduce multiple new standards that could create fragmentation. So, IAB Tech Lab plans to make “a significant engineering investment” — resources focused on AI development.

Technical advancements can come with a variety of challenges such as latency from older systems, industry fragmentation, so the roadmap focuses on building a unified foundation using existing standards. Introducing multiple competing new standards could further isolate different parts of the industry’s ecosystem.

The roadmap, outlined on Tuesday, details how IAB Tech Lab will integrate these standards with modern protocols such as Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent, and gRPC, to support secure, machine-speed execution and scalable coordination between independent systems.

Standards such as transactions, management, and deliver already exist, such as OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, VAST, and Deal API.

Measurement standards are already available, such as Open Measurement ID and the pending Conversion API. 

Existing privacy and regulatory frameworks include the Global Privacy Protocol (GPP) and Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF).

Taxonomies that provide a standardized framework for classifying and organizing digital advertising and marketing data, such as the ad product taxonomy, content, and audience taxonomies, also exist to provide a common language.

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.

“The industry gets the best of both worlds,” Katsur stated. “High-performance agentic execution combined with the interoperability, governance, and trust the market already relies on, without reinventing everything.”

“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,” said Ryan McConville, executive vice president, chief product officer of advertising platforms and operations at NBCUniversal advertising & partnerships.