EXCLUSIVE: PubMatic Is Betting AI Agents Will Finally Fix Programmatic’s Complexity Problem

The programmatic supply chain may be headed for a reset—one where buyers no longer toggle between dashboards, stitch together vendors, or manually orchestrate campaigns.

That’s the pitch from PubMatic, which is deploying a set of AI agents to plan, execute and optimize media campaigns in real time, through a new partnership with Untapped Growth, a collective representing 20 independent agencies.

At the center of the effort is AgenticOS, PubMatic’s AI infrastructure built in collaboration with NVIDIA, alongside its buying platform Activate. The system replaces traditional campaign setup workflows with a network of specialized AI agents that handle tasks like audience discovery and execution. PubMatic rolled out AgenticOS earlier this year. 

“Historically, buyers have logged into multiple different UIs and clicking boxes—it’s a sub-optimal way of working,” said Harry Tong, director, sales engineering, PubMatic. Tong said AgenticOS replaces that manual labor and instead packages those core functions into an application where each step of the media buying process—like audience discovery—is handled by its own dedicated bot.

When independent agencies use this system, they can input campaign preferences and automatically access the commercial terms negotiated by Untapped Growth.

“The legacy view of a supply chain within programmatic, where there is a buyer who logs into a DSP who connects to an SSP who connects to publishers on the back end—that supply chain is collapsing,” Tong added. “SSP, DSP terms are already a bit obsolete.”

The partnership lands at a moment when buyers are increasingly vocal about the complexity of programmatic workflows. “Buyers have become quite frustrated in the way that they have to interact with the programmatic ecosystem. There’s so much fragmentation and human led orchestration that they have to deal with on a day to day basis,” Tong said.

Whether agentic systems can fully replace that orchestration—or simply shift where it happens—remains an open question. But if PubMatic’s bet plays out, the industry’s long-standing distinctions between platforms, pipes, and partners may start to blur.

Two agencies within Untapped Growth are expected to go live shortly. A third agency testing AgenticOS saw an 82% reduction in buy-side costs and close to a 90% reduction in campaign setup time, according to PubMatic. 

Turning prompts into media plans

Untapped Growth is positioning the partnership as a way to compress the traditional media buying workflow into a single interaction.

“We have partnered with PubMatic to build our own buyer agent. We enable our agencies to tap into this agent to buying agentically,” said Brendan Clifford, co-founder and managing partner at Untapped Growth.

Clifford added that its indie agencies can input a media plan into an LLM—such as Claude—and execute transactions directly with supply-side platforms bypassing traditional DSP layers. In doing so, the agents help cut down on the “tech tax and the operating tax” of going through a DSP.

“Traditional buying approach for indies, where they are taking a brief from a client, and put together a plan, contracting with an SSP and a DSP, and all of that that has been condensed into one very efficient LLM prompt, reducing the time to market of that solution and ensuring the best possible cost efficiency to the highest premium inventory,” Clifford said.

The broader ambition is to give smaller agencies access to capabilities typically reserved for larger holding companies without requiring them to spend more.

“What this partnership with PubMatic helps us do is add the capacity and the capability to indies so that they can increase their speed to market, their flexibility and their transparency in how they tap into premium inventory in the programmatic space,” Clifford added.