Agentic buying is moving from conference-stage demo to production traffic faster than the industry can agree on how it should actually work. The newest sign: an independent ad tech vendor just used its own protocol choice to pick a side in a standards fight that is still being fought in public.
A vendor just picked a side
TeqBlaze, an independent ad tech company, announced this week that it has formally joined AgenticAdvertising.org (AAO), the industry group built around the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), an open standard defining how AI agents discover, plan, buy, sell and measure advertising across channels. AdCP is built on Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol and also supports Google’s Agent-to-Agent protocol as a second transport layer, itself a signal that AAO is trying to be shared infrastructure, not one vendor’s walled standard. AAO now counts more than 116 member companies, including Yahoo, PubMatic, Scope3 and Samba TV, alongside TeqBlaze and fellow AdCP testers MiQ and Ozone.
TeqBlaze’s own product is a concrete answer to a specific complaint from the sell side. “Direct sales is where publishers spend the most human time for the least automation: briefs, availability checks, terms negotiated over days of email, then creatives trafficked by hand once the deal closes,” said Anastasia-Nikita Bansal, CEO of TeqBlaze. Its sales agent MVP, live now in a free test environment, lets a buyer’s AI agent send a structured request for proposal to a publisher, has the publisher review and approve or reject the offer, then automates trafficking and invoicing once a deal closes, all without removing the publisher’s final say on each transaction.
The rulebook is still being written twice
The reason one vendor joining a working group is news is that the group it joined is not the only one writing rules for this. IAB Tech Lab, the standards body that already governs most of programmatic’s plumbing, has been publicly skeptical of AdCP’s premise. Anthony Katsur, IAB Tech Lab’s CEO, has argued the industry does not need another trade group solving problems he says existing standards like Ads.cert already address, and that his own organization is developing competing agentic standards, with details expected in the coming months. He has called agentic AI a shiny penny while conceding there is something real underneath the hype.
That is not a minor turf dispute. When two standards bodies each claim to be building the protocol AI buying agents will use, every publisher and SSP has to guess which one to build against, or build both. Executives close to the debate have raised two distinct concerns in public: whether the ecosystem is ready for the level of transparency agentic buying requires, and whether a new protocol like AdCP could reduce the oversight publishers currently hold over automated decisions. Neither concern has an agreed answer yet, which is exactly the kind of ambiguity that slows enterprise adoption even when the underlying technology already works.
IAB Tech Lab is not simply objecting from the sidelines. It formally published its own agentic advertising framework, the Agentic Advertising Management Protocols, back in March, months before AdCP’s current wave of member announcements. That timing matters: this is not a young incumbent standard versus a mature challenger, it is two frameworks published within the same year, each trying to become the default before the other locks in network effects. AAO’s approach leans on general-purpose AI infrastructure already adopted well beyond advertising, Anthropic’s protocol and Google’s agent-to-agent transport, while Katsur points to standards already running in programmatic, like Ads.cert, as evidence his organization does not need a new one built from scratch. Neither approach is obviously wrong. That is precisely why neither has won yet.
A pattern, not an isolated announcement
TeqBlaze’s move fits a pattern this publication has tracked closely this month. Agentic buying tools have moved from pilot to production at Magnite, FOX and elsewhere, and IAB Europe’s own research now has more than half of ad executives expecting agentic buying to reach scale within a year. What has lagged that deployment curve is agreement on the substrate underneath it. Sell-side vendors like TeqBlaze are effectively voting with their engineering roadmaps for which camp gets to define that substrate, one integration at a time, faster than either standards body is likely to resolve its dispute through negotiation alone.
What it means for the marketing leader
None of this is abstract for a brand buying media, or a publisher selling it. If AdCP and a rival IAB Tech Lab standard both gain adoption, the practical result looks like the early years of any protocol war: vendors supporting both to hedge, agencies asking which one a DSP or SSP actually implements before recommending a partner, and measurement vendors building translation layers between the two rather than one clean pipe. That is real integration cost sitting on top of the automation gains agentic buying is supposed to deliver.
The more useful question for a marketing or revenue operations leader right now is not which protocol wins. It is whether a given ad tech partner, DSP, SSP or measurement vendor, is building to an open, multi-party standard at all, versus a proprietary agent interface that only talks to that vendor’s own tools. TeqBlaze building inside AAO’s tent, with a publisher-approval step preserved at every stage, is a template worth asking every vendor to match, the same boundary between an agent that suggests and one that acts that is reshaping marketing AI rollouts generally. A vendor that cannot describe that approval step in a sales conversation is asking a publisher to hand deal-making judgment to a system nobody outside the vendor can inspect.
The standards fight will not resolve soon. Katsur’s own timeline for new agentic standards runs into next year, and AAO’s membership growth suggests it will not fold in the meantime. Marketing and revenue leaders evaluating any agentic ad tech pitch this quarter should ask directly which protocol camp a vendor is building against, and treat “we support multiple standards” as a cost center to plan for, not a feature to celebrate.
Source: TeqBlaze
