AI agents: large organisations are there, advertisers come last.
In IAB Europe's 2026 report, agentic maturity tracks company size, and advertisers post the lowest score in the whole sample.
IAB Europe's 2026 report ranks agentic systems on five levels of autonomy. At level 1, the human directs and decides, the agent acts. At level 2, human and agent jointly plan, delegate and execute. At level 5, the agent operates autonomously under monitoring.
Among respondents with more than 500 staff, 86% (12 of 14) describe their most advanced system at level 2 or above, mean score 2.5. Among those with 500 staff or fewer, 48% (16 of 33), mean score 1.45. Small numbers, so we stay careful, and so does IAB Europe. But the gap always points the same way, and it matches what Bpifrance Le Lab noted in March: 60% of French SMEs struggle to recruit or retain data and AI profiles.
The most striking number is elsewhere. By organisation type, ad tech scores 2.77, publishers 2.20, agencies 1.59. Advertisers score 1.00, the lowest in the sample. Those who pay for the campaigns are those with the fewest agents on their side. The agents sit with technology vendors and, to a lesser extent, with agencies. Rarely with the party whose budget is being invested.
That's no surprise. It's a problem, for a simple reason: the mid-sized advertiser is precisely the one with the most to gain from an agent on its side. A large organisation has a media team, a trading desk, sometimes a data scientist; the agent saves it time on tasks it already knew how to do. An SME has nobody to write Performance Max negatives, check the Conversions API, read search terms every day, compare the ROAS of three platforms that contradict each other. Its agency doesn't do it either, not for that budget. The agent doesn't save it time: it does work that wasn't being done.
The report says why it stalls. The first barrier cited, at 42%: lack of expertise and training, well ahead of cost, integration, legal uncertainty and security, tied at 30%. And 76% train their teams, but of 38 organisations that do, only 9 train people to check what an autonomous agent does and to know when to intervene. Technology isn't what's missing. It's the senior who knows what to ask the agent, what to forbid it, and when to stop it.
At mediagentic, a seasoned expert builds the plan and the rules; agents run it every day; all on a flat fee an SME's media budget can absorb.