Montreal — March 19th, 2026 (Ad Exchanger) — Using machine learning to automate and optimize ads is familiar to publishers. For years, this tech has helped publishers tune floors and serve the best ads behind the scenes.

Now, publishers are exploring automation and optimization through agentic AI. Many publishers have identified a similar use case: sales agents who actively make decisions in the auction on behalf of the publisher.  

Agents could handle smaller, highly segmented deals that traditional sales teams often ignore due to high transaction costs, said Patrick McCann, senior vice president of research at Raptive and a participant of the Prebid sales agent collaboration with AdCP.

“There are countless opportunities that never get executed because they’re too small or customized,” McCann said. By automating discovery and execution at scale, agents could reduce friction for both publishers and buyers, potentially limiting revenue lost to intermediaries.

As companies build these initial sell-side agents, some are using AdCP’s source code and some are not. Here’s how some early adopters, from publisher Weather Company to agentic audience platform Optable, are testing out seller agents.

How Optable tested sell-side agents

Ad tech companies that work with publishers are also testing out sales agents. Agentic audience platform Optable, for example, is building its own agents directly into its existing data platform. Optable is using a sell‑side agent for its data‑owner customers – often publishers and media companies, but not exclusively – to package their audiences and inventory for buyers who access those products through agentic workflows.

Inside Optable, that work starts with the company’s audience agent. A salesperson can, for example, upload an advertiser’s RFP and ask the system to suggest audiences that fit the brief.

Anthropic’s Claude is the front end for that process. Optable connected Claude into its data environment so when someone drops an RFP into Claude and asks for a plan, Claude hands the request off to Optable’s tools. Those tools route it to an AI model running inside Optable that understands how each publisher’s data is structured.

The agent returns with a mix of new audience ideas and existing segments it thinks might fit. Then, at the user’s request, it can create and activate those audiences and sync them with a publisher’s preferred ad platform, like Google Ad Manager.

That audience‑building layer is the foundation on which the sales agent sits.

The sales agent focuses on packaging and selling that data. Inside Optable’s dashboard, publishers can see a sales agent section where they can define specific products, such as a CTV package built from a publisher’s first‑party audience segments. Then, publishers configure how these data and media packages are priced and presented to buyers inside the agent. They can also approve which buyers are allowed to interact with their data through the agent.

For instance, Optable Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Bosko Milekic demoed a potential campaign, acting as the role of the buyer, where he described for the agent a fictional brand, who the brand wants to reach, preferred media types, and set a $1 million budget. Claude, connected to Optable’s sell‑side agent, turned that brief into a plan that listed which sellers and networks were relevant, how much would go toward data fees, how much toward media and how those campaigns would be executed.

When he asked to focus only on connected TV, the agent reworked the proposal around that constraint.

“Now it’s coming back with a refined proposal on how to allocate my million bucks,” Milekic said. “It’s saying, ‘Here’s the Family Network and FreshCard Media that have relevant products for you. Here’s the cost of the data, here’s the cost of the media.’ In this case, it’s proposing to execute these products through deals.”

Using the buyer’s existing demand‑side platform and ad server accounts, the system can move beyond a proposal and actually set up the programmatic deals in the exchange, so they’re ready for the buyer to start running campaigns. On the publisher side, those deals appear inside Optable as a list of incoming opportunities associated with their data.

While Optable counts itself as a supporter of Prebid, which now owns the sell-side agent code, it didn’t use the source code for this specific project. The agentic audience platform Optable, for example, which works closely with both Prebid and AdCP, did not use the source code.

“We are involved in the Prebid initiative,” Milekic said. “They’re assessing the code base, and there’s been some discussion around whether to start from scratch or to try to incrementally improve what was donated.”

Read how The Weather Company built a sell-side agent and where sell-side agents fit in the stack on Ad Exchanger.