In the first piece of this series, we ask ad tech experts what’s making the biggest impact on the industry as we progress through 2026. From autonomous media buying to incrementality, they share what they believe is shaping the landscape.

The ad tech industry is amid an era of drastic change. 

AI has been one the leading contributors to the sector’s transformation in recent years, revolutionising everything from ad buying to optimisation.

Generative AI continues to shake up all players in the industry, with agencies fighting to prove their worth, publishers being stripped of traditional search, and brands facing a new optimisation landscape for LLMs.  

Now, the rise of agentic AI signals further change, as AI is taken a step further to enable more autonomous systems. With agent to agent buying almost in sight, a whole new world of media buying is on the horizon all over again. 

New legislation is also bringing about significant change for the industry. Lawmakers all over the globe are drawing up new rules for social media, limiting children’s access to platforms which have finally been found liable for their harmful designs. 

A landmark ruling in the US against Meta and YouTube suggests that this could be just the beginning. As the tide appears to turn against Big Tech, the coming years could (hopefully) bring about considerable changes for how social media platforms are allowed to operate. 

Meanwhile, the advancing decline of third-party IDs continues to shape ad tech into 2026, with more privacy being expected by consumers and demanded by regional frameworks. As the industry progresses with an increasingly privacy-first approach, advertisers are pushed to innovate and create new opportunities in the space. 

What’s making the biggest impact at the moment? We asked leaders from across the ad tech sector to weigh in with their thoughts. 

The convergence of privacy-first regulation, AI-driven optimisation, and the continued decline of third-party identifiers are reshaping the industry 

In 2026, ad tech is being reshaped by the convergence of privacy-first regulation, AI-driven optimisation, and the continued decline of third-party identifiers. The most significant shift is the move toward consented, first-party data strategies, driven by stricter global frameworks and growing consumer expectations around transparency and control.

At the same time, AI is transforming how campaigns are planned, activated, and measured. From predictive audience modeling to dynamic creative optimisation, machine learning enables more efficient, outcome-based advertising without relying on intrusive tracking.

There is also a broader shift toward contextual signals and aggregated data approaches, as the industry adapts to operating with less granular user-level information.

Ultimately, the rules of ad tech are being rewritten around trust, accountability, and measurable performance – pushing the industry to balance personalisation with privacy in more sustainable and scalable ways.

Alvaro Pastor, CMO, Exte

Agentic AI is redefining the entire media buying experience

Expectedly, artificial intelligence continues to dominate ad tech chatter. While generative AI was previously at the forefront of this conversation, agentic AI has now pulled ahead in the terminology. Agentic is redefining the entire media buying experience, transforming every part of the journey from inventory discovery through measurement and performance.

We want agentic assistants to free teams from repetitive execution so they can focus on the work that actually builds brand value: the strategy, the judgment, the creative instinct that consumers respond to. The harder, less glamorous challenge is data quality and the structural work required to move it cleanly across systems. That's where most implementations quietly fail.

Regulation is the word I'll be watching over the coming years. Someone at a recent industry event remarked that piracy isn't a crime if no one enforces it. 

On the generative AI side, the value proposition still largely depends on creative work that wasn't explicitly licensed. On the distribution side, sports and premium TV rights are facing a new kind of piracy that existing frameworks struggle to address. It feels like both conversations are heading toward the same collision point.

Austin Scott, Chief Commercial Officer, Bedrock Platform

Courtroom battles, fraud, and consumer demand for short-form video 

One of the most significant shifts reshaping ad tech is presently playing out in the courtroom, as Big Tech faces mounting pressure over user protections and growing public demand for accountability. Meanwhile, fraud remains a huge challenge across the social media landscape. As these dynamics continue to unfold, we’ll see a move toward more substantive reform industry-wide and a steady reallocation of budgets to safer media channels, such as digital out-of-home (DOOH).

Beyond these evolving developments, consumer demand for short-form vertical video is also heavily influencing the ad landscape. Last year, portrait video saw a significant gain in spend on our DOOH platform. Whether played on unmissable screens in dense urban areas or interactive screens in big box retailers, this format will only continue to extend into real life environments this year through DOOH creative.

Dave Etherington, Vice President, Revenue and Partnerships, US, Broadsign

The rulebook is being rewritten by a simple idea: quality is no longer a secondary filter

If one factor is rewriting the rules of ad tech in 2026, it’s the industry’s broader definition of quality. The conversation has moved beyond basic viewability and directness.

Today, buyers are asking tougher questions: Is the supply compliant? Is the ad experience overloaded? Is the chain transparent? Is this a trusted seller, or just another path to the same impression? That matters because the cost of buying low-quality inventory is far greater than the cost of paying an extra intermediary fee on a good impression. In other words, ad tech is becoming more outcome-led and less mechanically optimised.

We’re seeing greater scrutiny on non-compliant supply, more emphasis on high-attention environments, and a clearer divide between inventory buyers trust and inventory they avoid. In 2026, the rulebook is being rewritten by a simple idea: quality is no longer a secondary filter. It is becoming the foundation of how the market buys.

Yael Schuster, VP of Marketing, Assertive AI

The rise of autonomous media buying 

Media buying is becoming autonomous, with AI enabling real-time bidding, optimisation, and decisioning at scale. But that’s the easy part. The real shift is the growing gap between intelligent buying systems and the fragmented infrastructure that feeds them.

AI is accelerating creative production and enabling massive personalisation, while new privacy regulations and platform fragmentation are limiting shared signals. The result is more complexity upstream, across creative, data, and workflows, at exactly the moment automation is scaling downstream.

So the biggest impact, outside of the new technology itself, is the pressure it’s putting on execution. The industry is realising that autonomous media buying can’t deliver without connected systems behind it.

The next phase of ad tech will be defined not by smarter bids, but by unified infrastructure that makes autonomous advertising actually work end to end.

Oz Etzioni, CEO & Co Founder, Clinch

It’s all about structural change 

Rewriting the rules of ad tech in 2026 is less about disruption and more about structural change. Identity is no longer the foundation it once was. With signal loss accelerating, the industry is shifting toward contextual intelligence, first-party data, and privacy-first collaboration models like clean rooms. The question is no longer who the user is, but what the moment represents.

At the same time, AI has moved beyond optimisation into orchestration. It’s now shaping bidding, creative, and supply path decisions in real time, reducing manual control while raising expectations on outcomes and efficiency. Much of the innovation today is focused on making these systems more adaptive and interoperable.

This is most visible in supply path consolidation. Buyers are narrowing paths, prioritising transparency, quality, and cost efficiency over reach. SSP-led curation is gaining traction, with curated supply and direct relationships becoming the default for more transparent and measurable media buying.

Frederic Liow, Chief Revenue & Operations Officer, AlgoriX 

Incrementality is at the core of transformation 

In 2026, we envision advertising technology as a unified system of intelligence, integration, and true impact. The industry is moving from fragmented, volume-driven strategies to a single, continuous user journey in which mobile, web, CTV, programmatic, and OEM channels operate.

At the core of this transformation is incrementality. Marketers are shifting away from attribution models that capture existing demand toward measurable, net-new growth, which represents actual ROAS without overlap.

AI is accelerating this transition through automation at virtually every stage and through agentic systems that forecast, optimise, and execute in real time under human guidance.

Unifying data is equally important. Modern DMPs are growing into strategic engines that link signals across regions, enabling cross-market synergies and more efficient global scaling.

Undoubtedly, the advertising technology rules also depend on industry saturation, privacy regulations, and technological progress.

To my mind, the rules might be rewritten by those who can combine cross-device tracking, intelligent automation, and transparent performance measurement into a scalable growth platform.

Yaron Tomchin, CEO, Mobupps

The move away from the “scale-at-any-cost” mantra to focus on high-quality trading 

With the turbulent geopolitical situation and uncertainty surrounding energy and infrastructure costs, buyers are looking to optimise towards efficiency, transparency, and long-term margin protection. In this landscape, it’s not one particular technology or regulation, rather the wider move away from the “scale-at-any-cost” mantra of the past to the focus on high-quality trading that will have a lasting impact.

With the focus on transparency, clean supply paths and curated supply rather than scale, ad networks set up for success will simplify complexity by packaging verifiable supply, reducing unnecessary hops in the supply path, providing transparency into where media runs, its performance and costs. A critical decision for ad networks is choosing the right programmatic partner - one that does not trade against them and whose success aligns with theirs.

There is also a definite movement toward a publisher-centric model, where publishers seek to reduce their dependency on single revenue sources instead placing more emphasis on sustainable monetisation growth, reduced technology costs and greater margins.

Lastly, AI integration, while providing many benefits, must be used with a hybrid approach, i.e. AI provided with clean data and clear objectives for rapid data-led optimisations, aligning buyer intent with publisher supply whilst human oversight determines the context, standards and output.

David Nelson, CEO, Limelight