Supply path optimisation emerged as a discipline because the programmatic supply chain became opaque. Too many intermediaries, too many fee layers, too little visibility into what the buyer was actually getting for the CPM it was paying. The response was to reduce the number of hops between buyer and seller and to favour supply paths where the provenance of the impression was clear.

An agentic market accelerates the removal of intermediaries. Buyer agents and seller agents can negotiate directly. The API mesh of DSP-SSP connections is no longer the only mechanism for connecting a buyer to a publisher. As agent-to-agent negotiation scales, the supply path gets shorter.

The paradox is that a shorter supply path does not automatically make verification easier. In some respects it makes it harder.

What did supply path optimisation actually solve?

Supply path optimisation addressed two problems: fee transparency and inventory quality. The fee problem was about understanding how much of each spend dollar reached the publisher rather than funding the intermediary chain. The quality problem was about ensuring that the inventory at the end of the path was what it claimed to be.

The solution, broadly, was to prefer supply paths with fewer hops and higher transparency. A direct connection to a publisher's SSP was preferable to a daisy-chain through multiple resellers. Authorised sellers lists helped buyers identify which paths were legitimate.

Both problems are real and both solutions are partial. Fee transparency improved but did not become complete. Inventory quality improved but did not become uniform. The underlying issue, which supply path optimisation addresses symptomatically, is that the market has no shared, enforceable standard for what constitutes a legitimate, compliant transaction.

Why does agent-to-agent trading make the verification problem harder?

In programmatic trading, the intermediary chain, despite its opacity, provides some verification functions. SSPs accredit publishers. DSPs maintain quality filters. Third-party verification services check viewability and brand safety. These functions are imperfect and often duplicated, but they exist.

When a buyer agent and a seller agent negotiate directly, bypassing the existing intermediary infrastructure, those accreditation and verification functions do not automatically transfer. The buyer agent is now responsible for verifying the seller's inventory claims without the accreditation backstop that a major SSP provided.

At the same time, the volume of direct connections increases. Instead of a few hundred DSP-SSP integrations governing most of the market, a fully developed agent-to-agent market could have tens of thousands of direct buyer-publisher connections. The verification overhead that was manageable in a concentrated market becomes unmanageable in a distributed one unless the verification itself is built into the deal structure.

How does deal governance fit into supply path optimisation in an agentic market?

Deal governance is the mechanism that makes verification durable in a direct-connection market. Instead of relying on an intermediary to accredit and monitor the supply path, deal governance builds the compliance requirements into the deal itself.

A deal that specifies the inventory parameters the seller is committing to, the audience it claims, the delivery conditions, and the remedies for non-compliance is a deal that can be verified after the fact against a shared record. The buyer does not need to trust the intermediary. It needs to trust the deal record.

This is the role Alkimi's deal governance infrastructure plays in an agentic market. It is not a replacement for the programmatic stack. It is the layer that provides the verification and accountability functions that the programmatic stack handled through intermediaries, but in a form that works for direct agent-to-agent connections.

What does supply path optimisation look like when agents negotiate directly?

The question changes. In programmatic SPO, the buyer optimises by selecting which supply paths to prefer among available intermediaries. In an agent-to-agent market, the buyer agent can evaluate publishers directly and negotiate the supply path terms rather than choosing between pre-existing options.

Supply path optimisation in this context becomes about selecting which publishers to negotiate direct relationships with, what compliance terms to hold those publishers to, and how to verify that direct relationships are delivering what they claim. It is a higher-stakes, higher-specificity version of the same problem.

The buyers who perform best in this environment will be those whose agent infrastructure can manage many direct relationships simultaneously, verify compliance against deal records at scale, and route spend dynamically based on observed compliance performance rather than on assumed accreditation from an intermediary. That is a meaningfully different capability requirement from current SPO practice.

What does this mean for the intermediary layer?

Intermediaries that exist primarily to manage the connection between buyers and sellers will find that function eroded as direct agent connections become more common. But intermediaries that provide genuine verification, accreditation, or governance functions will remain relevant, because those functions become more important rather than less as the market becomes more distributed.

The shift is from intermediaries as connectors to intermediaries as trust infrastructure. Alkimi's position in this market is as the latter: the deal governance layer that makes direct agent connections trustworthy rather than the connection itself. As direct connections scale, the need for that governance layer does not diminish. It grows.