What happens when people are removed from the digital media buy/sell process entirely? That was the question Media Tech Talk put to pubX Founder & CEO Andrew Mole and Country Manager, ANZ Andrew Gilbert, in a two-part conversation with host Daevid Richards on what it actually looks like once a Seller Agent on the publisher side and a Buying Agent on the advertiser side are negotiating directly with each other. No bid request anywhere in the middle.

Part 1 is live now, and covers how a pubX Seller Agent prices and negotiates publisher inventory, how a Buying Agent works for an agency without asking them to rip out their existing stack, and where ANZ publishers and advertisers are showing genuine appetite versus real hesitation.

What’s actually absorbed in the middle

Five years of pricing more than a trillion auctions gives Andrew Mole a specific answer to a specific question: how much of this industry is absorbed by platforms whose main job is simply moving spend from one side to the other, and how that compares — considerably less flatteringly — to something like Visa or Mastercard. Worth hearing him make the case himself.

The pitch, from both sides

On the sell side, a Seller Agent prices and negotiates an individual impression in real time. On the buy side, a Buying Agent negotiates directly with the Seller Agent on an agency’s behalf — whether that folds into their existing DSP or removes the need for one is exactly the kind of thing worth hearing Andrew answer directly.

What every ANZ publisher room is actually asking

Since joining pubX, Andrew Gilbert has been making this pitch directly to ANZ publishers and advertisers: agents handling the buying and selling. The reaction splits by design — real appetite in some rooms, real hesitation in others — and where each one shows up is the thread running through his half of the conversation.

Three different things wearing one label

AI-assisted, autopilot, and truly agentic get used almost interchangeably across the industry right now, but they describe three genuinely different levels of autonomy — and the two Andrews make the case that most platforms claiming the third are quietly doing one of the first two. Worth asking which one is actually running in your own stack.

The honest-answer problem

A concrete test case: what does a sales agent do when a buying agent asks for a million Sydney auto intenders, inside the hour? The honest answer is one traditional programmatic has never been particularly good at giving — agentic or not.

Part 2 goes further. It gets into what actually passes between a Seller Agent and a Buying Agent mid-negotiation, and the guardrails and off-switch once two agents are trusted to do a deal on their own. It asks what has to be true before a publisher hands an agent that kind of authority over their first-party data, and where pubX — a founding member of the Agentic Advertising Organization — sits if the larger platforms try to set the rules themselves. And it closes on Andrew Mole’s call for when agent-to-agent buying and selling stops being the experiment and simply becomes how it’s done.

Watch Part 1 below.

🎧 Or listen here:

🎥 YouTube: lnkd.in/etMUzmNY 🎧 Spotify: lnkd.in/emMQvxFn 🍏 Apple Podcasts: lnkd.in/gmu-FBt7

With thanks to Daevid Richards and the Media Tech Talk team for having us on. Part 2 to follow soon.