ADCP, the Agent Commerce Protocol, is an emerging standard designed for agent-to-agent transactions. As agentic advertising platforms develop, the question of which protocols they support matters for buyers and publishers evaluating their options. Understanding what ADCP covers, and where it stops, is useful context for anyone assessing agentic deal infrastructure.

What is the ADCP standard?

ADCP is a protocol specification for commerce conducted by autonomous agents. It sets out how agents should structure requests, negotiate terms, confirm agreements, and handle the state of a transaction as it moves from initiation to completion. The intent is to provide a common foundation so that agents built by different platforms can conduct transactions with each other reliably.

The standard is not advertising-specific in its origin, but its application to media is a natural extension: advertising deals involve structured terms, negotiation between two parties, and a record of agreement that both sides need to hold and verify.

What does ADCP define for advertising transactions?

For advertising, ADCP provides a structure for the negotiation stage of a deal. It defines how a buying agent can express a requirement, how a selling agent can respond with an offer, and how both sides can move through counter-proposal and agreement in a way that both systems can track and record.

It addresses the communication format and the transaction state machine. It does not define the business terms themselves: what constitutes a fair price, acceptable placement, or adequate verification is left to the platforms and parties using the protocol.

Who is building around ADCP?

ADCP is developed by its own standards group, separate from any single advertising platform. Several players in the agentic advertising space are building with awareness of ADCP and related standards as the field develops. The broader ecosystem includes platforms working on agent-to-agent deal infrastructure, standards bodies setting interoperability requirements, and measurement providers building audit capability around agent-negotiated transactions.

Early adoption tends to follow the larger platforms with the most to gain from interoperability: those that need their agents to transact with agents they do not control. As more buying and selling agents are deployed, the commercial pressure to align with a shared standard increases.

What does ADCP compliance mean for a media deal?

A platform that supports ADCP can conduct deal negotiation with any other ADCP-compliant agent, regardless of which system that agent was built on. For buyers, this means a briefing agent does not need a bespoke API integration with each publisher to negotiate a deal. For publishers, it means a selling agent can receive and respond to structured offers from any compliant buying agent.

In practical terms, ADCP compliance is less about a single capability and more about whether the deal workflow, from initial brief to agreed terms, is structured in a way that another system can read and act on without custom translation.

What ADCP does not cover

ADCP is a negotiation and transaction protocol. It does not cover delivery, measurement, or audit. Once a deal is agreed via ADCP-compliant agents, how the campaign is activated, how performance is tracked, and how disputes are resolved sits outside the protocol.

Governance, approval workflows, and the human oversight layer also sit above ADCP. The protocol handles the machine-to-machine communication; the policies about when humans must approve and what evidence must be held are determined by the platforms and organisations using it.

Alkimi supports agent-to-agent deal negotiation via shared DealSheets. The platform is designed to operate alongside emerging standards for agent commerce, providing a bilaterally-owned deal record that both buyer and seller hold once terms are agreed.