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Agentic media buying is moving from experiment into day-to-day advertising operations. According to the Impact of AI on Digital Advertising Report 2026 from IAB Europe, published on the 24th of September, 58 percent of respondents expect agentic ad buying to be used operationally or already at larger scale within the next twelve months.
The figure indicates a direction rather than a representative market share, however. Digiday reports on 50 surveyed advertising and media leaders. For marketing teams, the report is therefore mainly interesting as an industry indicator: AI has long arrived in advertising operations, but real autonomy is far less widespread than classic assistance and automation.
Large companies are much further along with agents
According to IAB Europe, 86 percent of respondents already use AI for marketing. Among companies with more than 500 employees, 86 percent of the relevant respondents state that their most advanced productive agent system reaches at least level 2. At this level, people and agents jointly plan, delegate and carry out tasks. Among smaller organisations, the share is 48 percent.
Digiday cites two further figures for expectations about actual trading: 30 percent expect AI agents to become a central route for buying and selling advertising in some markets. A further 28 percent expect regular use, though not yet at that scale.
The market study thus matches the concrete products now emerging. Apostra already wants to coordinate media buying across channels via AI agents. Early campaigns are also testing how far planning and purchasing can be automated: in a CTV campaign by Rouge Care, AI agents took over essential parts of media buying.
Reporting and optimisation still dominate
Day-to-day work nonetheless looks less autonomous than the vision. According to Digiday, 22 of 29 respondents named reporting, analysis and dashboards as the most common AI-supported workflow. Programmatic optimisation came in at 59 percent.
Investment is also continuing to rise. According to IAB Europe, 72 percent of the relevant respondents 2026 are investing more in AI overall than a year ago; 59 percent are specifically increasing their spending on AI marketing technologies. Operational efficiency is named as the most important success metric.
At the same time, participants rated the current performance of AI in advertising operations at an average of just 2,76 out of 5 points. This is precisely the difference between automation and reliable autonomous control: an agent can plan or optimise campaigns faster, but that does not automatically mean it produces better marketing results.
Governance is growing more slowly than use
The second major issue is control. 78 percent now name a formal owner for AI governance. Specific AI guidelines for advertising and marketing, by contrast, exist for only 48 percent, according to IAB Europe.
Security is named as the biggest concern, followed by data protection. 62 percent want practical AI marketing guidelines from an industry body, while 38 percent are still assessing the impact of the EU AI Act on their company.
For media and marketing teams, this means the bottleneck is shifting from "Can we use AI?" to "Which decisions may an agent make, which data may it access, and who is liable for errors?" This concerns more than the ad purchase itself. Marketing data platforms such as Palantir Foundry are also increasingly being used as the basis for agentic workflows.
What marketers can take from the report
For 2027, the decisive question is probably less whether providers carry "AI agent" in the product name and more how far these systems actually act autonomously. A clear distinction is therefore useful between assistance, partially automated optimisation, and agents that independently select and activate budgets or inventory.
Measurement remains equally important: efficiency gains are comparatively easy to see. Harder is proving that agentic buying also delivers incrementally better campaign results. That is where it will become clear whether the current wave of investment turns into a lasting new media-buying layer.