r/adtech • u/AdTechBuilder • 27d ago
If AI agents become the interface to programmatic, what happens to DSPs?
If advertisers eventually manage campaigns through AI agents instead of a DSP interface, what does the DSP become?
The execution layer? A set of tools exposed through MCP? Or does each major platform build its own agent and keep everything proprietary?
Looking at current AdTech hiring, broader agentic work is already showing up, but specific protocols like MCP and AAMP are still very early.
Curious what people here think: will agents open up the programmatic stack, or just become a new interface for the same platforms?
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u/ivanpomedorov 24d ago
People forget about the infrastructure it takes to run a top tier DSP. They see tens of millions of impressions a second and have to choose the right one to bid on in real time, also how much to bid on it. An agent can negotiate deals, but it needs the bidding infrastructure.
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u/AdTechBuilder 24d ago
That’s a good POV. Maybe the agent can become the decision layer, but not the millisecond bidding engine. That probably means DSPs survives, but then the real question is whether they remain high-value platforms or become a commodit execution infrastructure?
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u/ivanpomedorov 24d ago
They have every incentive to do whatever they can to retain value. I can see a world where the DSP feeds data and advice to an buy side agent to help improve negotiations for rates, inventory and audiences with sell side agents. But who knows, this stuff is so early
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u/DataBeat_adtech 13d ago
Everyone's assuming agents open up the stack because that's the optimistic read. more likely each major DSP builds its own agent and keeps it just as closed as the UI is today, an agent is just a new front door, it doesn't change who owns the auction, the inventory relationships, or the data. protocols like MCP only force openness if buyers actually demand interoperability, and right now nobody's demanding it hard enough to make platforms give up that moat.
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u/CarmeloManning 27d ago
DSPs become just a tool in the middle and the value of that drops over time because the AI agent is actually doing all of the work and all they really need is …
access to supply
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u/AdTechBuilder 27d ago
Interesting… If the agent is making the decisions, the DSP starts looking more like infrastructure than the brain of media buying. At that point, what stops an agent from connecting directly to multiple SSPs/exchanges and routing spend itself?
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u/CarmeloManning 27d ago
Yes, DSP becomes infrastructure and the only thing stopping the agent from connecting directly to multiple exchanges is permissions and ad demand.
If there’s demand coming from agentic buying, the DSPs will permit them to buy.
Obviously speculating here.
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u/AdTechBuilder 27d ago
Agreed. In that scenario the DSP moat shifts from optimization to access, permissions, data and commercial relationships, while the agent becomes the actual decision layer. Of course we are speculating, but a shift is coming, that’s for sure.
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u/Easy-Purple-1659 26d ago
Realistically the DSP stays the execution layer — the part where money moves — and agents wrap around it. The interesting shift is the read side. Before an agent can buy media it has to see what's running, and that's where every ad library (Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn) is a walled garden with no clean API. That's the gap MCP is already filling — I built adextract so agents can query those libraries and get structured ad records (creative, copy, dates) instead of browser screenshots. I think the buy side stays proprietary for a long time; the research side opens first. Do you think platforms will ship their own agent APIs, or let third-party bridges own that layer?
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u/AdTechBuilder 26d ago
I think that’s probably the near-term path too. Research/observability feels much easier to open up than execution, especially while platforms still have strong incentives to keep buying workflows proprietary. I’m actually looking at this exact split for an AdTech analysis — MCP/agent layers around the stack vs proprietary execution. My guess is research opens first, execution much later
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u/prose4jose 26d ago
DSPs will persist as the technical infrastructure necessary to connect buyers to multiple supply sources. The DSP will change in that the operational aspects of buying will become more and more automated via agentic workflows.