Agents Aren’t Coming for the Auction. They’re Coming for the IO.
AdCP turned one on 15 October. After a year of building with it, I think the early use cases are clearer than they were at launch, and they are not where most of the conversation is.
Everyone is talking about the auction
Most of the talk about agentic advertising is still about the auction. How will agents fit in? Will they replace DSPs? Will they make real-time bidding smarter?
I don’t think agents are coming for the auction yet. The auction is already automated, and it is very good at its job. At BidCliq we spend our days shaving milliseconds off header bidding auctions, and there isn’t much left for a large language model to do inside a few hundred milliseconds.
What agents are really coming for
Agents are coming for everything before and after the auction:
- The RFP.
- The media plan in a spreadsheet.
- The IO sent as a PDF.
- The back-and-forth on creative specs.
- The “can you send last week’s delivery numbers?” email.
Direct-sold is where publishers earn their best CPMs, and it is still the most manual part of the business.
Look at what AdCP standardised first
The clearest signal is what AdCP actually standardised in its first year: discovering products, creating a media buy, syncing creatives and pulling delivery reports. That is the lifecycle of a direct deal, not a bid request.
The rest of the ecosystem points the same way. The open-source sales agent that Prebid now maintains plugs into Google Ad Manager, the system publishers use to run both direct and indirect campaigns. IAB Tech Lab’s agentic direct work is built on OpenDirect. None of that is about bidding faster.
I don’t expect agents to kill programmatic. I expect them to kill the IO, and a lot of manual effort with it.
Why this matters for publishers
- Faster premium deals. A deal that takes weeks of emails could close in an afternoon.
- New direct buyers. Advertisers who were too small to justify a sales conversation could finally buy direct inventory.
- Better use of the sales team. People spend their time on relationships and strategy, not on paperwork.
Year two
Year one built the plumbing. Year two will show the use cases, for buyers and sellers alike.
For publishers, the practical first step is unglamorous: get your direct-sold products, pricing and inventory into a shape an agent can read. The publishers who do that work now will be the ones agents can actually buy from.
This article expands on a post I shared on LinkedIn.
About the author
Founder, BidCliq
Sharad Yadav is the founder of BidCliq, a publisher-first ad monetization platform that helps publishers and ad ops teams run header bidding, Prebid and programmatic across display, video, app and CTV. Before BidCliq, he led AdTech and product at GeeksforGeeks, where he built an in-house ads product that doubled programmatic revenue within nine months and an anti-adblock solution that lifted ad yield by 10%. He is a founding member of AdCP.