New Delhi [India], September 20 : Artificial intelligence could change the way advertisements are bought and sold by enabling automated communication between systems, reducing manual coordination across the fragmented advertising ecosystem, according to a report by ADvendio, an advertising technology company.
The report said the advertising industry is moving into a new phase of AI adoption, where autonomous systems could work across buyers, publishers, media networks and ad-tech platforms instead of being limited to individual tasks.
At the centre of this shift is the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), an open standard that creates a shared language for AI systems across the advertising ecosystem. The protocol can run over transports such as Anthropic's MCP or Google's A2A.
According to the report, AdCP can enable autonomous collaboration between buyers, publishers, media networks and ad-tech platforms.
In practical terms, a buyer's AI system could communicate directly with a publisher's or broadcaster's technology to discover advertising inventory, align targeting, verify availability and negotiate terms in real time.
The report said this represents a shift from traditional automation, where specific workflows are followed, towards agentic AI systems that can adapt to changing objectives and coordinate across multiple platforms.
For years, advertising operations have depended heavily on human coordination because different digital platforms and ad-tech solutions have largely operated in silos. This has added layers of administration and created operational bottlenecks around campaign execution.
The report described the evolution of ad sales in three stages. The first was a largely manual system, where sales professionals moved requests between clients and internal teams, with email chains and manual approvals slowing campaign execution.
The second phase came with AI-enabled assistance and copilots. These tools helped sales teams perform specific tasks and improved productivity, but did not address the underlying fragmentation between platforms.
The report said the launch of AdCP marked the beginning of a third phase, defined by autonomous, agentic automation.
Julian Ahrends, CTO at ADvendio, said the industry needs to address fragmentation that has affected ad operations for decades.
"To move forward, the industry has to solve the issue that has defined ad operations for decades: fragmentation. The launch of Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) in 2025 was a major leap forward in solving the fragmentation challenge," Ahrends said.
The report, however, said simply allowing AI systems to communicate does not make an advertising transaction automatically trustworthy. Commercial rules still need to be applied before a transaction can be completed.
For instance, a buyer and publisher's systems may agree on advertising inventory, but the transaction still needs to account for the agency's existing framework agreement, negotiated pricing, spending commitments and the publisher's margin requirements.
The report said this commercial layer needs to connect with the systems where contracts, relationships and financial terms are managed.
It added that in an AdCP-powered environment, the technology could communicate using a common operational language, while the commercial layer could handle matching, clearing, reconciliation and discrepancy resolution.
"Agentic AI is most powerful when it removes operational friction while preserving human judgment where it matters most," Ahrends said.
According to the report, this could help media organisations reduce manual data entry and shorten campaign activation timelines, while allowing autonomous technology to handle more of the operational dialogue involved in advertising transactions.
The report said open standards such as AdCP will be important as the advertising industry moves towards agentic AI, while commercial controls will remain important to ensure that autonomous transactions are properly validated.