Minutes after leaving the Founder Showcase stage at the Advertising Economic Forum during Advertising Week New York, pubX Founder & CEO Andrew Mole sat down with Aubriana Lopez for Agents of Change. Andrew covers why pubX is building agent-to-agent infrastructure, where people sit once agents join every buy, and a few hot takes along the way.

Agents in the loop

Andrew’s frame for the role of people is agents in the loop. Traders stay in the lead, and the brand’s rules come first. What changes is how the work gets done. A trader tells the buyer agent how the brand buys and signs off where it matters, and the agent does the reading, planning and execution inside those rules.
In Andrew’s words, the trader’s job moves from menus to conversations. The client sets the level of autonomy, and as the agents earn trust, that level can go up. Every decision the agent makes is reasoned, traced and auditable, so the people responsible for the budget can see why each dollar moved.

Built for agents from the ground up

Andrew offers a thought experiment – if today’s agents had existed 25 years ago, programmatic would never have been built the way it was. Programmatic solved the problem in front of it, taking the industry from fax machines and spreadsheets to real-time platforms in two decades, and everything pubX does builds on that.
With agents available now, pubX chose to build infrastructure for agents from the ground up, rather than an agentic layer on existing infrastructure. A buyer agent and a seller agent work directly with one another, from brief to reporting, across every channel. It runs on the open Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), and it is governed on both sides of every transaction.

A mechanism, not a channel

One of Andrew’s longer-range calls: programmatic describes how media gets bought, so it is a mechanism rather than a channel. In 20 years, he expects nobody will say they ran a programmatic buy. The conversation will be about the campaign, the audience and the media itself.

Why the Series A and Compliant, and why now

Andrew talks through the $5M Series A and the acquisition of Compliant, the media quality and governance company. pubX began on the publisher side, spending years helping publishers price and sell their inventory. Compliant, founded by former Unilever and P&G executives, built its business on the demand side. Together they put brand and publisher experience in one company.

Compliant keeps its name and operates as a pubX company, led by Jamie Barnard, who is also pubX’s President, Global Demand Growth. Its media quality and governance signals now sit inside the decisions pubX’s agents make, so an agent weighs quality before it buys. The result Andrew is building toward: more of every dollar reaches the media and the publisher behind it, and advertisers get higher quality media for what they spend.

The hot takes

The episode closes with a quick-fire round. Andrew names the industry buzzword he would happily retire, explains why he says please to Claude and checks in when its answers start to slip, and reveals the job he would take if advertising disappeared tomorrow. (Spoiler: it involves poetry.) You’ll have to listen for the buzzword.

The pubX view

No one hands a media budget to a system they don’t trust, so trust is where pubX starts. Our buyer and seller agents are educated by pubX, trained by the client and governed on both sides of every transaction. People set the level of autonomy and approve the plan at key stages, and autonomy grows as trust is earned.

The day after this conversation, we showed it working. At a private executive lunch during Advertising Week New York, a campaign for Reckitt’s Mucinex brand went from brief to live placement. Reckitt’s trading team approved the plan at key stages, and publishers including Paradium.ai, USA TODAY Co., and The Daily Beast reviewed and accepted the campaign from their seats in the room.
When the cost of trying an idea falls, brands try more ideas. That means more campaigns, better media and less waste on the same spend, and more of every dollar reaching the publishers who make the media worth buying.

Watch the full episode below or listen here:

🎧 Spotify

With thanks to Aubriana and the Agents of Change team, and to MadConnect, the series sponsor.