The concern that agentic media buying requires dismantling the DSP is common and understandable: the term implies a wholesale replacement of the decision layer, and the DSP is the decision layer for most programmatic teams. The concern is wrong. Agentic buying occupies a specific position in the workflow, and understanding where it sits makes the integration question considerably simpler than the category marketing suggests.

TL;DR: Agentic media buying sits at the deal negotiation layer, not the activation or serving layer. Your DSP remains in place. What changes is how deals are agreed between buyer and seller before they enter the DSP's execution pipeline. The integration question is about that negotiation handoff, not about replacing infrastructure.

What is a DSP built for?

A DSP is built to execute media buys at scale: to receive deal and targeting parameters, bid into auctions or activate against reserved inventory, manage frequency, report delivery, and optimise performance within its traffic. It is an execution engine. It was not designed to negotiate terms between buyer and seller before the inventory enters its pipeline; it was designed to receive those terms as a given and act on them.

Where does the agent layer sit?

The agent layer sits upstream of the DSP's execution function, at the point where deal terms are agreed. In a non-agentic workflow, this negotiation is handled by human account managers, trading desks, and programmatic specialists, usually across email, phone calls, and platform interfaces. An agentic marketplace automates and structures that negotiation step: the buyer's agent and the seller's agent agree terms, produce a deal record, and pass it to the DSP for execution. The DSP still executes. The agent agreed the terms it executes against.

What does the integration look like in practice?

In practice, the integration involves two connections: one from the buyer's systems (typically the DSP or a planning tool) to the agentic marketplace, to pass targeting parameters and deal boundaries; and one from the marketplace back to the DSP, to pass agreed deal terms for activation. Both are API connections. Neither requires changes to the DSP's core configuration or to the downstream reporting and attribution stack. The integration point is the deal terms handoff, not the serving infrastructure.

What changes: the negotiation step

What changes is the negotiation step and what it produces. In a traditional workflow, deal terms are agreed informally and encoded in each party's own system independently, which is the origin of the reconciliation problems familiar to any programmatic team. In an agentic workflow, the deal terms are agreed by agents, recorded in a single canonical deal record that both buyer and seller hold, and passed to each side's execution systems from that shared record. The DSP receives better-specified, pre-agreed terms. Reconciliation problems shrink because there is one version of the deal, not two.

What stays the same: everything downstream

Planning, targeting, activation, ad serving, delivery, measurement, attribution, finance, and reporting all remain in existing systems. The agentic layer does not touch them. This is an important constraint to hold when evaluating vendors: any agentic marketplace that requires moving measurement or attribution into its own platform is proposing something materially different from an agentic negotiation layer, with correspondingly greater integration complexity and risk.

What should you check before integrating?

Three things matter most. First, confirm the API surface for deal term handoff: what format does the marketplace use, what does the DSP need to receive, and whether there is a recognised standard that bridges them. Second, confirm that the approval mechanism sits on the buyer's side, not inside the marketplace: the buyer must retain the right to review and reject an agent-proposed deal before execution. Third, confirm the audit trail. When the deal is agreed, where is the record, who holds it, and who can access it. A marketplace that cannot answer those three questions has not finished its integration design.

Alkimi operates at the deal negotiation layer. Planning, activation, delivery, measurement, and attribution remain in the customer's existing systems. The integration point is the deal terms handoff, and the DealSheet record is held by both buyer and seller from the point of agreement, giving each side a bilaterally authoritative source for what was contracted.