Agentic AI Workflows and the Future of Streaming Ad Tech
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June 23, 2026
By<br>Nadine Krefetz Contributing Editor
Featured Articles
Agentic AI Workflows and the Future of Streaming Ad Tech
AI is bringing a new coordination lay­er to ad tech that is impacting every area of the streaming mone­tization workflow, including executing transactions, preparing inventory, understanding audience, and improving campaigns and measurement. Media planning is moving from static spreadsheets to living systems. The best teams are using AI to ask better questions, such as “What if supply shifts mid­flight?” or “What if this audience over-indexes on live?”<br>AI makes it possible to model delivery across live, VOD, and FAST together and to update forecasts as signals come in, instead of planning channel by channel.<br>The Current State of AI Adoption<br>How many people on the publisher side are currently using AI in ad tech? “I would say 35%, or maybe 40%,” according to Luciano Marcos Escudero, VP of media engineering at Globant.
Even so, it sounds like there are some very prom­ising use cases that Globant is working on for customers.<br>Some publishers are still testing the AI waters or just beginning to wade in. FreeWheel has encountered several publishers that are still evaluating things, while others are further along their adoption curve. Jeff Ellin, VP of product architecture at FreeWheel, says, “I think buyers are doing their homework earlier, and they already have an LLM of choice that they’re ready to use so they can connect to it and put their data through it a lot faster. I met with 18 European broadcasters,” he reports, “and there really were a number of them saying, ‘I am very interested in this. Can we start tomorrow?’ ”<br>Other publishers are expressing skepticism or doubt, Ellin says, and few, if any, are fully informed about the technology or the opportunities. “Some know a lot about it; some know nothing about it. This year, it’s more of a learning world. But at some point, [AI is] going to make the buying and the selling happen.”<br>Improving Efficiency<br>Shailley Singh, COO and EVP of product at IAB Tech Lab, says the real initial gains are to be found on the efficiency side: “AI for the media ecosystem is creating this ability for advertising companies from brands to agencies to ad tech companies and publishers to create this super efficiency in how they value impressions, how they negotiate, and how they work and manage campaigns.”<br>The industry is moving from basic machine learning into agentic workflows. From a standards perspective, IAB Tech Lab sees AI being integrated into three primary areas:<br>Autonomous transacting and execution—AI agents representing buyers and sellers negotiating and executing deals dynamically<br>Outcomes and measurement optimization—Using AI to connect upper-funnel engagement with lower-funnel conversions without relying on brittle legacy-tracking pixels<br>Content and rights management—LLMs and AI systems negotiating in real time with publishers to crawl, index, and monetize publisher content<br>“IAB recently unified all of our AI standards under AAMP [Agentic Advertising Management Protocols],” Singh says. “Instead of ripping out the plumbing the industry relies on, we are extending it. We are integrating modern AI protocols like Model Context Protocol [MCP] and gRPC into existing standards like OpenRTB, AdCOM, and OpenDirect.”
IAB Tech Lab’s AAMP Framework (Source: IAB Tech Lab)<br>(This wouldn’t be ad tech without more acronyms, but we’ll unpack some of these later in the article.)<br>Automation and Agentic AI Workflows<br>“Predictive AI has been around for a very long time—especially in the ad tech world—around forecasting and using machine learning to predict what is going to happen in the future to help pick the right advertising at the right time,” contends FreeWheel’s Ellin. This may be so, but a lot has happened recently, and now, “AI in ad tech” has a number of new meanings.<br>“Two years ago, if you tried to talk to any media companies, they were a little bit resistant to introducing AI as part of the workflows. Now that is a...