Sigma Software CEO Katherine Tuluzova joins IAB Tech Lab board

The addition of a technical CEO to the board signals a shift toward practical implementation as the industry prepares for AI-driven automation. By integrating agentic protocols into existing standards like OpenRTB and VAST, the IAB Tech Lab is attempting to standardize how AI agents interpret brand safety and bid signals. This move suggests the streaming and digital ad ecosystem is moving beyond human-managed programmatic toward autonomous systems that require new trust mechanisms. Watch for the first production tests of AAMP to determine if these protocols can effectively translate complex advertising definitions for non-human actors without losing accountability.

IAB Tech Lab has been accelerating its standards development agenda across multiple workstreams in 2026, with agentic advertising emerging as a central focus. The organization's Agentic Advertising Management Protocols initiative represents a new framework for how AI agents interact with programmatic infrastructure, building on existing specifications like OpenRTB and VAST that already govern billions of daily ad transactions. Sigma Software, a global technology services firm with deep roots in ad-tech engineering, brings implementation expertise that complements the board's existing policy and media-buying perspectives. The company has contributed to open-source ad-tech projects and maintains engineering teams that work directly with programmatic protocols, making Tuluzova's appointment a signal that the board prioritizes technical feasibility alongside industry consensus. The broader business context for IAB Tech Lab's agentic push includes significant investment activity in AI-driven advertising infrastructure. Nvidia is in talks to backstop as much as $250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing power from a US data center project, underscoring the scale of capital flowing into AI systems that will increasingly interact with advertising protocols. Meanwhile, Cerebras filed for an IPO with a reported $10 billion contract with OpenAI forming a cornerstone of its growth narrative, highlighting how AI compute providers are positioning for workloads that include real-time ad decisioning. These infrastructure investments create the hardware foundation on which agentic advertising protocols like AAMP will eventually execute, making standards governance at IAB Tech Lab increasingly consequential for the entire supply chain. On the technical side, IAB Tech Lab's existing standards portfolio provides the substrate that AAMP must interoperate with. The organization maintains specifications including ads.txt, sellers.json, and the Global Privacy Platform, each of which defines machine-readable signals that AI agents will need to parse and respect autonomously. Deepgram's integration with AWS SageMaker demonstrates how production AI systems are being deployed with scoped, auditable access controls inside customer environments, a pattern that parallels the trust and permissioning challenges AAMP must solve for advertising agents operating across organizational boundaries. The parallel is instructive: just as voice AI platforms require time-bound, auditable delegation mechanisms to operate safely in production, agentic advertising systems will need equivalent guardrails to ensure brand safety and compliance without human intervention at every decision point. As these systems evolve, to provide a baseline for the governance of these autonomous agents. Furthermore, to ensure these systems remain secure. Legislative efforts like the are also beginning to shape the regulatory landscape for these technologies. Amid these developments, the for top-down AI agent standardization to maintain industry-led control. As these autonomous systems proliferate, are also beginning to target the specific data handling risks posed by agentic systems. To address concerns regarding transparency, a to reveal hidden loyalties. Meanwhile, highlights the shifting landscape of industry-led standards governance, which faces further pressure as to address market dominance.