The organization that writes ad tech’s plumbing standards just added an engineer to write the next set for AI agents.
IAB Tech Lab, the body behind OpenRTB, VAST, ads.txt and sellers.json, appointed Sigma Software Group CEO Katherine Tuluzova to its Board of Directors. The appointment lands as the Tech Lab extends its standards work into agentic advertising through AAMP, the Agentic Advertising Management Protocols, meant to give autonomous buying and selling agents the same shared definitions the rest of the ecosystem already runs on. Tuluzova came up through Sigma Software as a Java developer before becoming global CEO in 2025; she also chairs Prebid’s LLM and Publisher Monetisation task force.
IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur framed the pick as deliberate: “Specifications only matter if they ship, and her engineering experience will help keep our roadmap grounded in what the ecosystem can implement.” Tuluzova’s own read on the job: “Advertising works as a market because everyone agreed on how to describe an impression, a bid, and a brand-safety signal. Agents change who is reading those definitions, not whether we need them.”
That is the real story here, bigger than one board seat. Every version of agentic advertising floated so far, from DSPs adding AI copilots to retail media networks opening self-serve agents, assumes the underlying protocols for bids and brand safety hold once a model is the one issuing them. Ad tech has already split into competing camps over how to govern that shift, and standards bodies moving slower than the products they govern is the industry’s oldest failure mode. Putting an implementer on the board that writes AAMP is a bet the spec gets built by people who also have to ship it, the same test IAB’s parallel push to standardize AI disclosure in ads is already running.
Source: ExchangeWire
