When Publishers Get AI Agents: Andrew Mole on Agentic Trading and the Future of Media

<p>Programmatic advertising automated the transaction. <strong>AI may automate the negotiation.</strong></p><p>In this episode of Signal &amp; Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Andrew Mole, CEO and Co-Founder of PubX, for a provocative conversation about agentic trading, publisher monetization, and what happens when AI agents begin representing both sides of the advertising market.</p><p>Andrew has spent much of his career watching programmatic evolve from a breakthrough in efficiency into an extraordinarily complex ecosystem of DSPs, SSPs, exchanges, data providers, verification platforms, and intermediaries. His argument is simple: much of this infrastructure exists because humans needed interfaces and platforms to manage complexity. AI agents don’t necessarily have the same limitation. </p><p>That raises a bigger question: <strong>If we designed digital advertising from scratch today, would we build the programmatic ecosystem the same way?</strong></p><p>Andrew’s answer is essentially no.</p><p>PubX is already experimenting with agent-bought and -sold media, with Andrew revealing the company is currently transacting several thousand dollars per day through emerging workflows. The volumes are still small, but agentic trading is beginning to move beyond demos and PowerPoints into actual transactions. </p><p>The conversation explores two possible futures. In one, AI agents operate on top of today’s DSPs, SSPs, ad servers, and other infrastructure. In the more radical version, buyer and seller agents communicate directly—potentially eliminating significant portions of the traditional programmatic supply chain.</p><p>The result could be a shift from <strong>automated auctions toward autonomous negotiation</strong>, where agents negotiate not only price but audiences, 1PD, measurement, inventory quality, outcomes, and commercial terms.</p><p>For publishers, the implications could be enormous. Instead of simply accepting market prices, intelligent sell-side agents could continuously represent the value of a publisher’s inventory, audiences, data, &amp; commercial interests at a scale no human sales organization could match. </p><p>Andrew explains how PubX is approaching this opportunity across more than 3,000 publisher sites and why publisher 1PD becomes dramatically more valuable when machines can discover and activate it at scale. The conversation gets deep into the plumbing: OpenRTB, Prebid, ad servers, buyer agents, seller agents, and whether the industry actually needs today’s DSP and SSP architecture in an agentic future.</p><p>That leads to one of the episode’s biggest questions: <strong>Who wins and who loses?</strong></p><p>Andrew argues pubs and advertisers have powerful economic incentives to embrace agentic trading, while intermediaries could face serious pressure. DSPs, SSPs, and agencies won’t necessarily disappear—but their roles may need to change .</p><p>The discussion also explores the future of agencies, verification and brand safety, publisher sales, and whether AI could actually strengthen the premium open web by allowing publishers to capture more of the value they create.</p><p>And this may not be a distant future. Andrew expects meaningful adoption of agentic trading to begin in 2027, with a potentially significant share of media transactions shifting in this direction. </p><p><strong>In this episode, we explore:</strong> agentic trading vs. traditional programmatic; buyer &amp; seller AI agents; publisher 1PD; the future of DSPs and SSPs; OpenRTB and Prebid; agency disruption; autonomous negotiation; publisher monetization; brand safety &amp; verification; and the future of the open web.</p><p><strong>The big idea:</strong> Programmatic automated execution. Agentic trading could automate judgment. And once buyers and sellers are represented by intelligent agents capable of negotiating directly, the architecture—and economics—of digital advertising could look very different.<br>#SignalAndNoi