pubX’s Buyer and Seller Agents have been negotiating and transacting live campaign spend, agent to agent, for months. We continue to grow our footprint of pubX sales agents for premium publishers across the globe.

The debate playing out across the rest of the industry isn’t whether this works, it’s how fast everyone else catches up. What guardrails need to be in place when things shift?

That was the throughline at the MediaPost Data & Programmatic Summit in Lake Tahoe this summer, where Rachel Klausner, EVP Commercial, North America, represented pubX. There’s real excitement around agentic AI right now, Rachel says, “Everyone understands we’re learning together and that common ground is energizing, alongside a healthy dose of “OK… but how does this actually work?” realism, as everyday jobs start to change, hopefully for the better.”

On the ground

A few things we kept hearing:

Are agents really going to buy media? From where we sit, that’s already settled. The real question is how much of the buying process they’ll actually own, what checks and balances are in place to avoid costly mistakes, and what that adoption window looks like.

Planning is the easy part. Giving an agent a brief and having it build a media plan is one thing. Letting it decide where to spend millions of dollars, negotiate terms and transact? That’s a very different level of trust, requiring independent sub-agents working together across inventory, governance, commercial terms, and creative approval.

The first disruption may be discovery. This is the most common entry point into agentic workflows. While not truly autonomous end-to-end, the agentic discovery through deal ID process gets our toes wet and our minds familiar with new systems, while still running on existing infrastructure. (Unfortunately, that also means no change to existing cost structures or fee stacks.)

Today, sellers spend enormous time getting buyers to understand their inventory, audiences, and value. Now the “buyer” is an agent evaluating thousands of options in milliseconds. This is step one of many.

Not everything labeled “agentic” will survive. There is, and will continue to be, plenty of AI theatre. The things that actually remove friction, improve outcomes (for both buyers and publishers), and make buying operationally easier will win. The rest will fade pretty quickly.

Transformation through trust & autonomy. What does a media buyer’s day look like when agents are doing the execution? The decisions that matter still sit with people: the brief, the plan, the rules the agents run inside, and the approvals at each key stage of the buy. What changes is everything in between. Those approvals are where trust is earned, and as the agents prove themselves campaign by campaign, the buyer hands them more, and the team’s time shifts from running the buy to growing it.

Where that leaves us

We’re at a pretty interesting inflection point, and we’re excited to be working in the middle of it.

Thanks to the MediaPost team for welcoming pubX, and to everyone who made Tahoe such a great few days. Clarity from confusion, and a few Wet Woodys! (IYKYK, Mediapost-ers!)

See you next year. By then, expect even more results from the agent-to-agent campaigns already running today.