Nearly six in 10 ad executives — 58% — expect agentic ad buying to reach operational use or scale within a year, according to new research from IAB Europe.

The finding marks a shift in an industry that has kept its distance from agent-to-agent ad trading, wary of the technical cost and definitional questions still hanging over it.

IAB Europe surveyed 50 ad executives across 44 European markets this spring and summer. The results show that expectation is not uniform, because the businesses in the sample are not starting from the same place.

The bigger organizations are well ahead. Among respondents at companies with 501 or more staff, 86% already run their most advanced agentic systems at a level where people and agents plan, delegate and execute work together.

At companies with 500 staff or fewer, that number falls to less than half — 48%.

The size gap points to a resource divide in how quickly agentic systems move from experimentation to everyday workflow. Large organizations appear to have cleared the technical and organizational hurdles that still slow smaller players.

Expectations of agentic trading are just as divisive as adoption levels, if not more so, the research indicates. What "operational use or scale" actually means depends on who was asked, since definitions of agentic buying vary across the industry.

That definitional ambiguity has been one of the reasons ad execs have held back from letting AI agents spend ad dollars. The new data suggests the wariness is starting to ease, at least among larger players already running hybrid human-agent workflows.

For marketers and media buyers, the divide raises a practical question of timing: those waiting for standardized definitions and lower technical costs may find the larger players have already locked in an operational head start when agentic buying does hit scale.