The IAB Tech Lab.
| Dimension | Traditional UX | Agentic Experience Design (AXD) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary material | Attention and affordance | Trust and delegation |
| User state | Present, navigating | Absent, delegating |
| Design output | Screens and interfaces | Outcomes and constraints |
| Temporal model | Session-based | Relationship-based |
| Success metric | Task completion | Trust calibration |
AAMP is the IAB Tech Lab's umbrella initiative for governing how autonomous AI agents operate within the advertising ecosystem. Announced in February 2026 and fully unveiled at the Beet Retreat, AAMP comprises three pillars: (1) ARTF - the Agentic Real-Time Framework, a high-performance execution control plane that cuts real-time bidding latency by 90% through containerised agent co-location; (2) Agentic Protocols - schemas, SDKs, and reference implementations built on AdCOM and OpenDirect that
The Agent Registry, launched on 1 March 2026 by the IAB Tech Lab as part of AAMP, is the first operational trust infrastructure for non-human economic actors in any industry. It provides agent identity verification, capability disclosure, and accountability records - enabling buyer and seller agents to verify each other before transacting. From an AXD perspective, the Agent Registry is the advertising industry's implementation of Know Your Agent (KYA) principles, and it represents the first real
The Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) is a competing initiative founded by Yahoo, Optable, PubMatic, Scope3, Swivel, and Triton Digital. Unlike AAMP, which builds on the IAB Tech Lab's existing advertising standards (OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect), AdCP is built directly on top of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP). Now at version 3.0 as of March 2026, AdCP provides advertising-specific workflows for campaign setup, bidding, and media buying. The AAMP-vs-AdCP dynamic mirrors the A2A-vs-MCP fragmenta
Advertising was structurally pre-adapted for agentic commerce because its core transaction - the real-time bid - was already machine-to-machine. Programmatic advertising has operated as automated agent-to-agent trading since the early 2010s, with demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) executing billions of transactions per day without human involvement. The shift to agentic AI does not introduce machine-to-machine trading to advertising; it introduces autonomy, judgment, a
AAMP is the IAB Tech Lab's umbrella initiative for governing how autonomous AI agents operate within the advertising ecosystem. Announced in February 2026 and fully unveiled at the Beet Retreat, AAMP comprises three pillars: (1) ARTF - the Agentic Real-Time Framework, a high-performance execution control plane that cuts real-time bidding latency by 90% through containerised agent co-location; (2) Agentic Protocols - schemas, SDKs, and reference implementations built on AdCOM and OpenDirect that
On a Tuesday in March 2026, a brand's autonomous media buying agent submits a bid for a premium video placement on a publisher's inventory. The bid is not a number. It is a structured mandate: a set of audience parameters, brand safety constraints, attention thresholds, frequency caps, and a maximum cost-per-outcome that the brand's human marketing director specified three weeks ago and has not revisited since. The publisher's selling agent receives the mandate, evaluates it against fourteen other bids from fourteen other buying agents, and accepts the one that best satisfies its own mandate - a set of yield targets, advertiser quality thresholds, and audience composition requirements specified by the publisher's revenue team. The transaction completes in eleven milliseconds. No human on either side was consulted. No human on either side was aware it happened. The brand's agent reports the placement in a weekly summary. The publisher's agent adjusts its yield model and moves to the next bid. Somewhere between the two, a trust verification occurred: each agent confirmed the other's identity, capability scope, and authorisation chain before the transaction was permitted to execute. This is not a future scenario. This is the operational reality that the IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP) Advertising is not the industry most people associate with the frontier of Programmatic advertising - the automated buying and selling of digital media inventory through real-time bidding (RTB) - has operated as machine-to-machine trading since the early 2010s. Demand-side platforms (DSPs) submit bids on behalf of advertisers. Supply-side platforms (SSPs) evaluate and accept bids on behalf of publishers. The transaction volume is staggering: billions of bid requests per day, each resolved in milliseconds, each executed without human involvement at the point of transaction. The infrastructure for machine-to-machine trading in advertising is not emerging. It i