Athul Prabhu: Programmatic’s next value creator is the intelligent supply side

Programmatic innovation has so far been built for the media buyer, but the action is now moving to the supply side, said Athul Prabhu, Director of Product Management, Truecaller, at the e4m Real Time Programmatic Conference 2026. His session was titled "The Rise of the Intelligent Supply Side: How the Sell Side Is Becoming Programmatic's New Value Creator".

For years, Prabhu said, supply "has acted as a passive pipe for a long period of time, offering just undifferentiated inventory". He identified three shifts changing that.

The first is bidding intelligence, which covers decisions made before a bid request is even sent. He pointed to an estimate that 99 per cent of bid requests from supply side platforms and publishers receive no bid, calling it "a colossal waste of infra, effort and opportunity". The answer, he said, lies in traffic shaping and sell side curation, matching supply with the right demand and enriching each request using first-party data. Because publishers sit closest to the user and understand context, this yields richer targeting.

The second is auction intelligence. Publishers and platforms have long worked with black-boxed platforms and static waterfalls, but Prabhu said that is no longer acceptable given how quickly business conditions change. The shift is towards owning a platform built for specific use cases, with AI-driven real-time decisioning engines extracting the best outcome from each opportunity.

The third is outcome intelligence, or moving from selling inventory to selling outcomes. Prabhu rejected the idea that programmatic is a zero-sum game, saying there are "win-win-win transactions" in which buyers, sellers and the platforms in between all gain. He also urged the industry to treat programmatic relationships as business partnerships that go beyond integrations.

For media buyers, he argued, the stakes are high. Curated supply offers signals unavailable in open auctions, so buyers should "think beyond open auctions" and explore private programmatic partnerships with publishers. As publishers take on more of the decisioning, the feedback loop to the buy side can go well beyond standard metrics, answering whether a bid won, why it did not, and whether a request was sent at all.

On why India and why now, Prabhu said these conversations are mature in global markets, but the big opportunity is here, with the DPDP Act now upon the industry. He called it a chance to build partnerships "built on trusted signals".

Truecaller, he said, is "leading the charge". The company has built a decisioning engine that combines all three forms of intelligence and runs in real time for every impression across its 500 million monthly active users globally, with promising early results. It is also focusing on signal integrity, extending the layer of trust it provides in protecting users from scams and fraud into the programmatic ecosystem, and on co-building solutions with partners.

"It's the same user, it's the same consumer, and it's the same advertiser," Prabhu said, adding that "there's magic" to be unlocked when supply and buy sides build intelligence together instead of in isolation.