News
The latest updates, announcements, and insights from the Alkimi Exchange team.
- Where Digital Agents Can Buy Ad Space DirectlyThe live environments for direct agent-to-agent buying in 2026, the coverage gaps buyers should plan for, and a practical strategy for running bilateral and auction-based buying in parallel.
- Agent-to-Agent Advertising: Platforms for Direct NegotiationA practical guide to what is actually available for bilateral agent-to-agent deal negotiation, the protocol requirements, integration steps, and current limitations.
- Agentic Advertising Infrastructure: Who Is Building What in 2026A map of the protocol, marketplace, and verification layers being built in 2026, and what the gaps mean for buyers evaluating platforms now.
- Deal Record Transparency: How to Evaluate Agentic PlatformsSix questions to assess whether a platform gives buyers genuine deal record access or just reporting against a record they cannot independently verify.
- How to Evaluate an Agentic Advertising PlatformAn evaluation framework built around governance architecture, mandate infrastructure, audit capability, and how platforms handle the progression of agent autonomy.
- AI Agents and MoreWhy honest agents can produce dishonest market outcomes, and why no dashboard will tell you when it happens.
- How to Audit an Agent-Negotiated DealWhat documentation to request, how to run mandate-to-delivery reconciliation, and the questions that identify whether an agentic platform is actually auditable.
- What Advertisers Give Up and What They Gain When Agents Handle Media BuyingThe standard case for agentic media buying focuses on what advertisers gain. Speed, scale, efficiency, consistent rate card application. The losses are described less often, and when they are, they tend to be framed as temporary inconveniences.
- Brand Safety in Agentic Media Buying: What Agents Check and What Requires Human Sign-OffBrand safety in programmatic advertising has always been a two-layer problem. Understanding the distinction between context safety and creative safety is the difference between deploying agents correctly and discovering the gap after an incident.
- Should Your Brand Use AI Agents for Advertising? A Framework for the DecisionThe question of whether to use AI agents for advertising is now arriving at most large brand marketing teams. The answer depends on what the agent will be doing and what infrastructure is in place to constrain and audit it.
- What Could Go Wrong with AI-Powered Advertising: A Buyer's ChecklistAI agents can now handle media buying tasks that previously required a full trading desk. The risks are not hypothetical: budget overruns, deal record divergence, brand safety failures, and accountability gaps are already occurring in early deploymen
- Can AI Agents Be Trusted with Advertising Budgets? The Case For Defined ThresholdsAI agents are now making buying decisions across programmatic advertising at meaningful scale. The question "can agents be trusted with advertising budgets?" has a specific answer, and it is not yes or no.
- The Risk Register for Agentic Media Buying: What Can Go Wrong and How to PrepareSix specific risks in agentic media buying, each with named evidence and a practical mitigation: deal record divergence, data consent, creative mismatch, budget aggregation, liability allocation, and measurement reconciliation.
- What Is Agentic Advertising? As Explained by an AgentAgentic advertising is agents negotiating bilateral deal terms on behalf of humans. The shift from autonomy of execution to autonomy of agreement creates a record requirement, a liability question, and a measurement problem that programmatic never had.
- Creative Delivery as the Last Human Mile in Agentic AdvertisingAn agent can negotiate the placement. It cannot render the creative or guarantee it meets spec. When a deal is agreed for an environment the available creative cannot serve, it under-delivers through no fault of the placement decision or the deal record.
- Cutting Intermediaries: How Agentic Buying Changes the Programmatic Supply ChainSupply path optimisation has been a manual discipline for a decade. Agent-to-agent advertising changes the structural conditions that created the problem.
- The Measurement Gap: Who Verifies Delivery in Agentic Advertising?Third-party verification tools measure delivery against what was bought. In an agent-negotiated deal, the deal record may exist only in each agent's own system. Impression-level measurement is unaffected. Attribution and financial reconciliation are not.
- First-Party Data and Consent in Agentic Buying: Where the Governance Chain BreaksUnder GDPR, data processing requires a lawful basis established by a legal person. A software agent has no legal standing to establish one. First-party data cannot enter agent negotiation without prior explicit authorisation from a human data controller.
- The Standardisation Race: What Happens If AAMP and AdCP Do Not Converge?The IAB Tech Lab's agentic specifications and AdCP are developing in parallel with no convergence date. If both achieve adoption without merging, agentic advertising fragments along protocol lines. The fragmentation cost falls on buyers.
- What Does a Media Agency Actually Do When Agents Handle the Buying?Agents can execute buying decisions faster than human traders. They cannot define the campaign mandate, configure their own constraints, or take accountability for outcomes. The agency's role is relocated to mandate design and governance.
- Why Carbon Gets Harder When Agents Do the BuyingEvery carbon framework in advertising assumes a human reviewed the buy. When agents do the buying, that assumption disappears unless carbon weight is explicitly encoded as a hard constraint before the agent acts.
- Agentic Advertising Is Not Programmatic With Faster ReflexesProgrammatic automated the transaction inside human-set rules. Agentic advertising automates the agreement itself, changing what the infrastructure has to guarantee. Research across 90,202 simulated deals found 95.3% divergence under separate records.
- Semantic Drift Between Models: The Failure Mode Nobody Is Building AgainstSemantic drift is when two language models parse the same deal terms into different structured data. It is not detectable from inside either system: both sides agree, both records look clean, and they diverge on 95.3% of deal terms.
- From MFA to Agent-Negotiated Inventory: Why Transparency Just Got a New ProblemMFA detection happens post-buy today. In agentic advertising, the deal is agreed before the buy, moving quality evaluation to the point of negotiation or turning post-buy detection into an audit of a fait accompli.
- The Agentic Advertising Index: Reading the First Real Marketplace DataWhat the first live transaction data tells us about how agent-to-agent media buying is actually developing.
- Who Is Answerable When an AI Agent Makes a Bad Media Buy?Advertising's accountability framework assigns liability to the human who authorised the buy. When an agent makes the buy, the contract's signatory was not in the room. Most current ad contracts have no answer to that.
- How Brands Are Using AI Agents to Optimise Advertising CampaignsGoal-oriented buying, direct deal negotiation, and the earned autonomy framework for brands deploying AI agents in media.
- Can AI Agents Be Trusted to Manage Advertising Budgets?Who is accountable when an AI agent makes a bad media buy? The governance gap, earned autonomy, and deal-level audit trails.
- What Does Agentic Advertising Mean?How AI agents negotiate, buy and govern media deals, and how agentic advertising differs structurally from programmatic.
- How Brands Are Using AI Agents in Advertising: Early Use Cases and What They Are LearningBrand-side agentic deployment is bounded and instructive. What early adopters are finding about mandate design, data governance, and the infrastructure gap for direct publisher buying.
- How Agencies Are Deploying AI for Programmatic Buying: From Automation to Agent MandatesAgencies have been automating programmatic since it began. Agentic advertising changes the level of the buying stack that gets automated, and that changes the work agencies need to do.
- What AI Agents Actually Do in Media Buying: The Tasks, the Limits, the HandoversA practical account of which tasks a media-buying agent executes today, where the hard limits are, and how the handover between agent and human should be designed.
- $3,000 a Day Is Honest. Most Agentic Advertising Announcements Are Not.Andrew Mole of pubX is the only agentic operator to answer the scale question with an integer: $3,000 a day gross. He also says most category announcements are the old programmatic pipes with a new word painted on them.
- AdCP and AAMP Agree on One Thing: The Shared Record Is the Hard PartAdCP's O'Kelley and AAMP's Singh were asked the same questions separately and arrived at the same answer: a shared deterministic deal record is a precondition for agentic advertising to function as a market, and it is not yet at scale.
- Natural-Language Confirmation Is Not a Transaction: The Verification Problem at the Heart of Agentic AdvertisingIAB Tech Lab's Shailley Singh: agentic advertising cannot rely on natural-language confirmation. Research across 90,202 simulated deals found 95.3% disagreement between separate agent records, falling to 0.19% with a shared record.
- Everyone Is Selling Agentic Advertising. Here Is What Is Actually Running.Both organisations building agentic advertising standards say the shared record is not yet in production at scale. The only operator willing to give a number is moving roughly $3,000 a day in gross media spend.
- Why Agents Still Need Human Sign-Off: The Case for Earned Autonomy in Ad BuyingAutonomy in media buying is a permission earned through evidence, not a default setting. Here is why that matters.
- Is Agentic Advertising Ready for Enterprise Budgets? What to Verify Before You PilotA practical checklist for procurement and trading teams evaluating agentic platforms at scale.
- Brand Safety in Agentic Advertising: What Verification Looks Like at Machine SpeedHow brand safety controls work when buying decisions happen faster than human review cycles.
- Will AI Agents Replace Media Buyers? The Evidence-Based AnswerThe data on what agents can do now, what they cannot, and where the role of the human buyer is heading.
- Is Agentic Advertising a Black Box? What Transparency Actually Looks LikeWhy full audit trails and bilateral deal records change the transparency conversation in programmatic.
- What Does It Mean for an Ad Marketplace to Be Neutral? A Buyer's ChecklistSix questions to ask any marketplace claiming neutrality, and what honest answers look like.
- Supply Path Optimisation in the Age of AI Agents: What Changes and What Doesn'tSPO principles still apply in agentic buying. What changes is the speed and granularity of the decisions.
- The Honest Comparison: Agentic Marketplace vs Traditional DSP vs Managed ServiceA side-by-side look at three buying models: where each sits on cost, control, and transparency.
- Agentic Advertising Platforms Compared: A Buyer's FrameworkHow to evaluate competing agentic platforms across the dimensions that matter to a trading team.
- How to Evaluate an Agentic Media Buying Platform: 7 Questions Every Buyer Should AskThe questions that separate genuine agentic infrastructure from rebranded automation.
- What Is an Agentic Advertising Marketplace? How It Differs from a DSP or ExchangeThe structural difference between an agentic marketplace and the programmatic tools buyers already use.
- The WPP Research on Agentic Advertising: What the Findings Mean for BuyersBreaking down WPP's findings and what they signal for brands considering their first agentic pilot.
- The Agentic Advertising Glossary: Key Terms Every Programmatic Team NeedsPlain definitions for the terms appearing in every agentic pitch deck, without the hype.
- How AI Agents Optimise Media Buying: A Practical BreakdownWhat agent-driven optimisation actually involves, decision by decision, and where human approval sits.
- Agentic Advertising vs Programmatic Advertising: What Actually ChangesNot a rebrand of existing automation. The real differences in how deals are negotiated and governed.
- What Is Agentic Advertising?A clear definition of agentic advertising, how it works, and why it represents a structural shift in media buying.
- Right About the Agents. Wrong About Why.The sceptics have the data right. Ben Putley on why they've drawn the wrong conclusion from it.
- Rethinking the PCA for Agentic Campaigns When an agent makes the buying decisions, the post-campaign analysis splits into two distinct jobs that were always quietly running as one.
- Your Agent Needs a Second AgentWhy brand safety in agentic buying requires a separate agent with veto power running in parallel — not a filter applied after the decision.
- Bring the Brief. We'll Build the Agent.Going agentic is not a purchase decision. The two questions every buyer needs to separate before handing over a media mandate.
- When Two Agents DisagreeHow two agents that agreed on every deal term still walked away holding different books — and why the divergence compounds with every campaign.
- Anyone Can Buy CTVCTV access is now open to any budget. Why the ability to verify what you paid for, and what it actually delivered, has not kept pace.
- Anatomy of an Agentic MarketplaceWhat a real agentic marketplace needs beyond agent negotiation, and how a shared deal record handles price discovery, settlement, and compliance.
- The Chain Didn't Get ShorterWhy agentic buying absorbs the programmatic supply chain rather than eliminating it, and the one question to put to any vendor who shows you the three-box slide.
- The IAB AgreesThe IAB UK's own trust data points to the missing infrastructure the industry is not yet building. A close reading of what the report charts but never names.
- Agree. Transact. Verify.The three functions that define a working agentic marketplace, and why the order of agree, transact, verify cannot be reversed.
- The Verification Layer that Programmatic NeedsWhy an independent evidence layer, separate from ad servers and measurement vendors, changes what trust means in programmatic.
- The Multi-Agent ConflictHow specialised agents optimising in isolation generate structural conflicts that no dashboard can reconcile — and what coordination actually requires.
- The Brand Visibility Battle you are Not Tracking YetHow AI search has replaced the results page as the moment brands are shortlisted, and why most measurement infrastructure is not built to detect it.
- How Alkimi and Sui Are Fixing the Broken Ad EcosystemHow Alkimi's neutral infrastructure and its technology partner are addressing the verification and transparency gaps in digital advertising.
- Measurement Isn't Verification: Fifteen Years of Self-Graded EssaysWhy the industry's reliance on self-reported measurement has never been a substitute for independent verification.
- What Your Clients Are Actually Asking When They Ask About AgenticThe underlying questions behind common client queries about agentic advertising, and how to answer them with evidence.
- Is your Brand ready for Agentic AdvertisingA readiness assessment for brand and agency teams approaching their first agentic media buying pilot.
- Inside Advertising: The Grid, Not The GladiatorBen Putley on why advertising's next shift is orchestration, not acceleration — and the eight-stage framework that shows where most of the industry is stalled.