How 6 ad tech execs define agentic advertising

Amid all the discussion around agentic frameworks and protocols, debate over what agentic advertising means has intensified across the industry.

But at least one thing is clear: While agentic advertising may be in its early stages, the industry is forging ahead, regardless of whether a consensus exists.

With that in mind, The Current asked industry leaders — from the sell side to the buy side and beyond — how to define this emerging tech. Below are their responses:

Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab: There’s a tendency to overcomplicate this. Agentic is just systems executing and interacting across advertising workflows. That only works if it’s structured. Execution, protocols and trust all have to be defined together.

Josh Lee, Chief Technical Officer & Head of Product, EDO: Agentic advertising is when AI doesn’t just answer questions — it takes action. In TV measurement, where EDO operates, it’s the difference between a tool that tells you which creative is driving consumer engagement and one that actually adjusts your media mix in response. The “agentic” part means the system can perceive, reason and execute across multiple steps without a human in the loop for every decision. But you should still check its work. We’re still in the early stages of implementing agentic AI as an industry, but the infrastructure is catching up fast.

Ian Maier, General Manager & Ad Tech Lead, Hightouch: Agentic advertising is about reinventing how marketing actually gets done, not just automating pieces of it. For most of the last decade, marketing has been a fragmented, manual process: Teams ideate in one place, build in another, activate somewhere else and measure separately. Agentic systems collapse that into a single loop where AI can analyze, create, execute and optimize continuously.

Bill McLaughlin, SVP, Advertiser Solutions, PubMatic: Agentic advertising is the shift from manual optimization to autonomous execution, where software agents act on behalf of buyers and sellers in real time. It’s not just AI as a tool; it’s AI as an operator, ingesting signals, learning from outcomes and dynamically optimizing supply paths, bidding and inventory against defined goals. The key difference: Agentic systems don’t just recommend they act, continuously driving outcomes like ROAS, reach quality and conversion efficiency.

Karim Rayes, Chief Product Officer, Nexxen: Agentic advertising is the shift toward AI-driven systems that don’t just surface insights, but act on them. That means automating planning, activation, optimization and measurement in real time.

Frans Vermeulen, President, Swivel: Agentic advertising is what you get when the intelligence already in the ad tech stack gains the ability to execute, not just inform.