You are going to sit through a demo this quarter. An agent will type a brief in plain English, a seller agent will answer, a deal will appear on screen, and somebody in a quarter-zip will say the word "live." It will be genuinely impressive. It will also be, in the strict sense, a magic trick, because the interesting part is not the thing you can see. The interesting part is the volume, the record, the take rate, and the board.

This week's Investigation put yes-or-no questions to the man who wrote one of the two competing agentic standards, and a right of reply to the standards body that wrote the other. Both answered on the record. What came back is the closest thing this market has to an answer key, which means you can now grade any agentic pitch against the people who build the plumbing rather than the people selling the tour.

Here is the first question, in full, free, with its answer.

Those are three different states of the world, and every deck in this category collapses them into one word. A protocol can exist as a spec. It can work in a sandbox. It can move real money at real volume. Vendors will happily let you assume the third when they have earned the first.

The answer. Brian O'Kelley, on the record, asked precisely this about the binding signed record in AdCP: "Exist yes. Work yes. Active in production at scale: not yet."

Read it twice, because that is the author of the protocol. Not a skeptic. Not a competitor. If your vendor is claiming more for the plumbing than the plumber is claiming, you are not being sold a product. You are being sold a roadmap with a demo attached.

A good answer draws that distinction before you ask. A bad answer is the word "live" with nothing behind it. Live is a status. It is not a volume.

We are not going to pretend this is generosity. The remaining four are where the money is, and they are behind the wall.

Question 2 asks for the daily gross media spend and the publisher count. One CEO actually gave us both, on the record, and the number is small enough that it reframes the entire category. It is also lumpy, and he disclosed the lumpiness without being asked, which tells you something about who is worth listening to. Members get the figure.

Question 3 is the one that separates a purchase order from a conversation, and both standards bodies agree on the principle while disagreeing about how hard it is. One of them used the word "expected" about a piece of infrastructure your vendor is describing as finished. Members get the word, the version number, and the release window.

Question 4 is the take rate. One side gave us a number. The other side disputed the number everyone has been repeating, declined to supply the correct one, and confirmed the reason. Members get both positions in the parties' own words.

Question 5 takes under two minutes to check and almost nobody checks it. It is the governance question, and the answer is sitting in a public file that describes who sits on the board of the thing being sold to you as neutral infrastructure. There is also a test for who is actually building versus who is announcing, proposed by one of the subjects himself, which we are printing precisely because he proposed it.

Members get the file, the names, and the test.

There is a sixth question.

We asked it three times.

It has never been answered, which is why it did not make the card.

Because the free list gets the story and members get the tool. Today's full Field Kit ships with a one-page card built to be printed, screenshotted, or written on the back of an agency invoice, plus three hard dates the parties put their own names next to, so you can run all five questions again the week after each one lands.

The gap between the demo and the ledger is currently a specific dollar figure and a specific number of months.

Both are in the members' edition.

That gap will close, probably faster than the skeptics think and considerably slower than the decks promise.

Until it does, five questions with on-record answers are worth more than any category report, because none of the answers match the pitch.