58% of ad execs expect agentic buying to hit scale within a year, according to IAB Europe research
Digiday ·
Agentic buying is 2026’s year of the mobile.
Ad execs have kept their distance from agent-to-agent ad trading, wary of the technical cost and definitional questions still hanging over it. New research says that wariness is starting to shift.
Fifty ad execs across 44 European markets were asked about it this spring and summer, and 58% of them expect agentic ad buying to hit operational use or scale within a year. What that phrase actually means depends on who was asked, because the businesses in that sample aren’t starting from the same place. Unsurprisingly, the bigger organizations are well ahead. Most of them (86%) who are at companies with 501 or more staff already run their most advanced agentic systems at a level where people and agents plan, delegate and execute work together. Drop down to companies with 500 staff or fewer and that number falls to less than half, 48%.
Expectations of agentic trading are just as divisive, if not more so.
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