pubX’s agents don’t wait for an auction. A Seller Agent on the publisher side and a Buying Agent on the advertiser side negotiate a deal directly with each other — no bid request anywhere in the middle. That’s the model pubX Founder & CEO Andrew Mole and Country Manager ANZ Andrew Gilbert walked through with Media Tech Talk host Daevid Richards, across a two-part conversation. Part 1 covers how the pricing and negotiation actually works.

Part 2 is where the harder questions land: once two agents are negotiating with each other at machine speed, who’s actually in control, and what happens when something goes wrong?

What’s being exchanged

Andrew Mole’s answer starts by ruling out the obvious guess. A pubX Buying Agent doesn’t send a bid request, it breaks a campaign brief down into intent and parameters: what the campaign is trying to achieve, for whom, and where. That gets handed to the Seller Agent, which matches it against real inventory, data and past performance, and can build a new audience segment to meet the brief. Nothing about it runs on the probabilistic guesswork of a traditional bid request.

“What’s really transacting is just information, and it’s very human.”
Andrew Mole, Founder & CEO, pubX

That governance runs through AdCP — the open protocol governed by the nonprofit Agentic Advertising Organization (AAO), of which pubX is a founding member — built directly into every handoff. In practice, it means a publisher’s own rate card gets encoded directly into the agent:

“If the publisher tells us they don’t want to sell this inventory for less than $15, it won’t. It can’t go.”
— Andrew Mole

Mole also described the deliberate layering behind it — what he calls an “agent sandwich,” where structured, deterministic software sits between every agent handoff, so there’s never more than one layer of interpretation at a time. His comparison point is the old programmatic world’s dashboard alerts, where a CPM spiking 100x usually just meant a buyer had fat-fingered a number into a DSP. The bigger risk, in his framing, isn’t the new technology — it’s the pressure already-stretched ad ops teams are under without it.

Trust is a boundary, not a hand-off

“A publisher isn’t giving an agent authority — they’re giving it boundaries to act within.”
— Andrew Gilbert, Country Manager ANZ, pubX

Gilbert points to a trust dynamic Australian publishers already know: TV networks that have spent years truncating IP addresses rather than risk anyone matching their audiences in the bid stream. Programmatic never gave them a way to hold that line with confidence. Agentic, built on boundaries the publisher sets, does.

It matters beyond the broadcasters, too. Independent agencies win 68% of new business pitched in Australia but lack the engineering resource to build agentic infrastructure themselves — and with the News Bargaining Incentive structured as separate deals with eight tech partners, Gilbert argues it does little for the roughly 355 other Australian publisher entities left outside it. Agentic, in his view, is one of the few things that can actually drive revenue to that mid and long tail.

Whose rules?

pubX puts its weight behind AdCP as the open standard — alongside Prebid’s own IAB-aligned equivalent, which pubX also supports. Whether the industry converges on one shared approach or fragments into competing standards is still open. Mole’s read: agentic puts the open web on par with a walled garden — a single campaign can now reach inventory across every publisher running a compatible agent, rather than needing separate DSP setups and per-platform minimum spends. Even Google, he noted, is reportedly exploring making YouTube inventory buyable through third parties via agents — a sign that even the biggest walled garden sees where this is heading.

The timeline 

Mole has been public before about a specific call: 2026 as the “antechamber” for agentic, Q1 2027 as the point it stops being an experiment. 

Part of the case is economic: publishers currently see around 42 cents of every advertiser dollar spent, against 75–80+ cents under an agentic model — with agencies and advertisers better off too, not just publishers. It’s already showing up in practice: one UK holding company is currently using a pubX Buying Agent for print bookings, replacing what used to be roughly a hundred emails back and forth with the agent’s intent going straight into the booking system, as pubX continues rolling this out more broadly.

The pubX view

None of this is framed as a pivot — it’s what five years of building on the publisher’s side was for. Governance, rate cards, and boundaries aren’t new concepts; agentic just gives publishers a way to enforce them with more precision than programmatic ever allowed. And the market this lands hardest in isn’t necessarily the biggest broadcasters — it’s the mid and long tail of publishers the current system was never built to serve.

Watch Part 2 below.

Or listen here:
🎧 Spotify: lnkd.in/eH9Cc6Kf 🍏 Apple Podcasts: lnkd.in/gmu-FBt7

With thanks to Daevid Richards and the Media Tech Talk team.