The pitch sounds almost too clean: give your ad operations team the output of 15-to-20 people, without hiring a single one of them. For publishers still manually logging into half a dozen ad platforms to manage campaigns, it may also sound overdue.
Agentic AI has become advertising’s buzziest concept in 2025 and into 2026, but most of the noise has come from the buy side. Frans Vermeulen thinks that framing undersells what is happening on the sell side, where publishers are quietly deploying AI agents to automate the unglamorous but revenue-critical work of trafficking, yield management, and campaign optimization.
“The sell side isn’t lagging versus the buy side,” said Vermeulen, president and co-founder of Swivel, in a video interview with Beet.TV. “Both sides are trying to innovate using these latest tools.”
Twenty years of manual labor
Swivel focuses on advertising operations for connected TV and linear TV, a corner of the industry that has digitized rapidly but never fully shed its dependence on human operators. The company works with around 20 publishers across the United States, with LG named publicly as one customer.
The core problem, as Vermeulen described it, has persisted for two decades: people logging into multiple ad platforms, running reports, adjusting pricing, and managing trafficking by hand. “As ad tech has evolved, as the television ecosystem has evolved and become more digital, a lot of the challenges, you still have humans logging into a bunch of different ad platforms,” he said.
Swivel’s answer is to deploy what it calls trafficking agents and yield agents that can perform those same tasks autonomously, freeing human teams for more strategic work. The pitch lands differently in TV than in digital display, because the TV ecosystem layers linear inventory, connected TV placements, and premium formats like home screen takeovers on top of one another, each with its own platform and pricing logic.
What a seller agent actually does
Vermeulen broke the job of a seller agent into three distinct functions.
- The first is ad product discovery: codifying the full inventory of available ad products, which he compared to SKUs, and surfacing the right ones in response to a buyer agent’s campaign brief. A pickup truck advertiser targeting a specific income bracket and demographic, for instance, would receive a matched set of linear and digital inventory options.
- “Job number two is including things like pricing rules,” he said. “What is the right price for this buyer versus that buyer? A lot of people have pre-negotiated rates with different kinds of buyers. So managing pricing rules and enforcing pricing rules in a transparent way is job number two.”
- The third function is availability and forecasting: how many units of a given ad product are actually in stock. “If you can do those three things really well, that begins to automate a lot of how TV trades in a human-to-human capacity,” Vermeulen said. Swivel has already run four or five campaigns traded fully agentically, he noted.
The interoperability question
The practical challenge for any publisher-side AI platform is that its publishers rarely operate on a single stack. Vermeulen described customers using three, four, five, six, or seven different ad platforms to cover sales pipelines, order management, financial reconciliation, and ad serving. A genuinely agentic system, in his view, must be neutral enough to integrate across all of them.
That is part of the rationale behind Swivel’s involvement as a founding member of AdCP, a protocol initiative launched in the fall of last year that aims to establish standards for agent-to-agent communication. Vermeulen also pointed to parallel work from the IAB on complementary standards, welcoming both efforts. “The more attention on this topic, the better. The more standards that are out there, the better,” he said.
The bureau forecasts a 9.5% year-over-year increase in U.S. ad spending for 2026, with agentic ad buying cited among the AI-driven forces reshaping how media is planned and transacted. Swivel’s bet is that the plumbing connecting buyer and seller agents will matter as much as the agents do.
