IAB Tech Lab announces an agentic roadmap, but don’t expect any love for AdCP

A new year means a new roadmap for the ad tech industry’s ongoing fixation.

IAB Tech Lab unveiled its agentic roadmap for digital advertising on Tuesday, detailing plans to scale agentic buying and selling through existing standards and protocols.

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

He added: “The fastest and smartest way forward is to build on an existing shared foundation, not introduce multiple new standards that create fragmentation.”

Noticeably absent from the announcement was Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) — though it’s hard not to read between the lines. AdCP was launched last year by a group of companies eager to capitalize on agentic AI, pitching it as a way to enable agentic advertising from the ground up.

In an interview in October, Katsur told The Current that the industry did not need another “trade group” and that the Tech Lab already addresses some of the problems AdCP is trying to solve.

Then in November, Tech Lab announced the release of Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF), aimed at standardizing agentic workflows across the programmatic ecosystem.

Freddy Dabaghi, chief transformation officer at Crispin, echoed that there is already infrastructure in digital advertising to build agentic capabilities.

“Media’s been doing AI for a while,” he told The Current. “It’s called programmatic.”

So while Tech Lab’s roadmap suggests a different approach than AdCP, Katsur has cautioned that scaling agentic advertising will require patience.

“Although AI solutions will increasingly take shape, the industry should expect several false starts in deploying agentic solutions,” Katsur recently predicted.

“The promise of agentic AI is real and meaningful, yet its practical application will require years of market experimentation, standardization and alignment across platforms, agencies and publishers.”

The roadmap announced this week aims to make that alignment possible by building upon standards that “already power digital advertising” and integrating them with existing AI protocols, like Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent.

In 2026, the Tech Lab is planning to launch initiatives that include standardized agent profiles and additional agentic open-source tools based on industry feedback. In February, it will also host a series of agentic AI “boot camps and workshops.”

“Scale only works when interoperability is real,” George Panagopoulos, chief technology officer at Experian Marketing Services, said in a statement. “This roadmap makes it clear how agentic execution can expand without sacrificing control or transparency.”