OpenProposal refers to IAB Tech Lab’s proposed specification, designed to standardize how publishers describe their ad products and respond to buyer briefs in a machine-readable format that AI agents can understand and evaluate.
What Is OpenProposal?
IAB Tech Lab announced OpenProposal on September 22, 2026, as the key addition to AAMP 3.0, the latest release of its AAMP framework. While it already covers agentic execution, version 3.0 extends it to the RFP stage, a largely manual phase between an advertiser’s brief and a buy commitment. As AI agents take over more of the planning work, publishers need a common way to describe their ad products and answer briefs, and OpenProposal was developed to provide it.
Technically, the OpenProposal specification defines an object model that describes what is being bought and sold in a structure buying agents can parse and evaluate at machine speed, from the initial brief to committed commercial terms. It does not replace existing standards: each line item lands in the one its transaction mechanism maps to, whether OpenDirect 2.1, Deals API, or OpenRTB 2.6.
Benefits of OpenProposal
For advertisers, OpenProposal makes it possible to evaluate a much broader universe of media opportunities. Buying agents can discover and compare publisher inventory against a brief, handling more seller information than a human planner could realistically review. Beyond raw data, the proposals preserve context, such as package rationale, ad formats, and underlying price terms, that planning models can directly process.
This specification gives publishers and ad tech vendors a standardized approach to make ad products visible to buying agents without losing control over their inventory. Sellers can expose a catalog of public packages while holding back specific products for tailored proposals. OpenProposal also complements OpenDirect, AdCOM, and Deals API, meaning current programmatic implementations can remain unchanged and ad platforms don’t need to rewrite their existing use cases.
Perspectives of Adoption
As of November 2026, OpenProposal remains a draft. Its first version was released for public comment on September 22, the comment period was extended from October 22 to November 10, and machine-readable schemas are expected to follow in the first revision. Still, early groundwork is already underway: the specification is being built into the Buyer and Seller Agent SDK reference implementations, while IAB Australia has opened expressions of interest for a seller-side pilot to test discovery, proposal, and approval workflows in a sandbox.
Once the standard is finalized, the largest buyers, sellers, and platforms with agentic roadmaps are likely to be the first to adopt it within approximately six months, followed by smaller players as its benefits become proven in practice. Since OpenProposal builds on Deals API and other existing standards rather than replacing them, its integration should be less disruptive than that of a standalone protocol, although implementation and testing will still take months.