LiveRamp today launched the LiveRamp Agent Builders (LAB) program, a formal initiative to allow third-party AI companies to bring purpose-built agents onto its data collaboration platform and make them available directly to marketers. The announcement, made on June 17, 2026, marks a structural expansion of the agent ecosystem LiveRamp has been assembling since October 2025.

The program introduces a distinct technical pathway for external builders. According to LiveRamp, partners in the LAB program can leverage the company's APIs and MCP servers to make their agents accessible to the entire LiveRamp customer base, doing so in coordination with the LiveRamp team rather than through individual commercial agreements. During the pilot period, brands receive access to agents from all participating AI companies, allowing marketers to find tools that fit their workflows without committing to a single vendor upfront.

Four founding partners, four distinct use cases

LiveRamp named four Founding Partners at launch, each addressing a separate segment of the marketing workflow.

SemantIQ focuses on health and life sciences. According to LiveRamp, the SemantIQ integration enables AI-native workflows inside the LiveRamp Clean Room, allowing healthcare marketing teams to build and activate healthcare provider audiences, run media analytics, and generate faster planning intelligence across audience creation and optimization.

Manik Khanna, Co-founder and CEO of SemantIQ, described the rationale for operating inside a governed environment: "AI agents have the potential to transform how healthcare marketing teams interact with complex media and claims data, but only if they operate within governed, auditable environments. By deploying SemantIQ within the LiveRamp Clean Room, we're helping teams accelerate speed to insight and make better-informed decisions across audience creation, media analytics, planning, and optimization."

Newton Research connects to LiveRamp's Cross-Media Intelligence system. According to LiveRamp, Newton Research agents deploy intelligent analysis to unlock analytics and media optimization across data environments, turning measurement data into actionable insights. Albertsons Media Collective is already using Newton Research's agent in production. Liz Roche of Albertsons Media Collective said: "At Albertsons Media Collective, we're focused on advancing how data collaboration supports more effective marketing and measurement. LiveRamp has built the infrastructure that makes agentic data collaboration real, and we're excited to put it into practice with LAB partners like Newton Research. Together, we're unlocking comprehensive analytics across data environments, turning the full value of Cross-Media Intelligence into insights that inform decisions."

Newton Research is not a newcomer to the LiveRamp ecosystem. The company's agents went live on March 3, 2026, when LiveRamp first deployed active agentic AI capabilities. Newton Research was founded by entrepreneurs who previously sold Data Plus Math to LiveRamp, giving the firm deep familiarity with the platform's measurement architecture.

Akkio covers the audience workflow from discovery through activation. According to LiveRamp, Akkio enables media teams to move from audience discovery through analysis, segment creation, and activation, all within a single agentic workflow. Jon Reilly, CEO and Co-Founder of Akkio, summarized the practical impact: "Akkio's and LiveRamp's partnership gives media teams a faster path from 'What audience should we target?' to a segment that's built, validated, and ready to activate, without the manual handoffs."

Akkio's inclusion as a founding partner builds on a partnership announced on April 7, 2026. That earlier arrangement integrated Akkio's conversational AI engine into LiveRamp's measurement reports, allowing non-technical users to interrogate data through natural language questions. The LAB program extends that relationship by formalizing Akkio as a platform-level agent provider.

Datalinx handles the foundational data preparation layer. According to LiveRamp, Datalinx automates the standardization, mapping, and maintenance of client first-party data and taxonomies for use across LiveRamp products. Joe Luchs, CEO of Datalinx, cited a specific performance benchmark from prior work with the platform: "We've produced great results for LiveRamp before, including delivering 99+% data mapping accuracy into Cross-Media Intelligence in minutes, and are excited to contribute as a founding partner in LAB. LiveRamp has built the essential infrastructure for helping brands connect, activate, and maximize the value of their data. Datalinx is designed to accelerate that process by automating the preparation, maintenance, and shaping of first-party data products, so customers can launch high-value use cases with LiveRamp's products as quickly as possible."

How the technical access model works

The LAB program operates on two parallel tracks. On the customer side, marketers receive access to all agents participating in the pilot program and can deploy them for new or existing workflows using the LiveRamp platform. The framing here is breadth - during the pilot, customers are not required to select a single agent provider, and the program is explicitly designed to let marketers test multiple tools against the same underlying data infrastructure.

On the partner side, the technical entry point is LiveRamp's API and MCP server layer. MCP - the Model Context Protocol - is an open standard for connecting AI systems to enterprise data and tools through standardized interfaces. LiveRamp introduced agentic orchestration on October 1, 2025, positioning itself as the first data collaboration platform to give AI agents governed access to its full marketing toolset, which spans identity resolution, segmentation, activation, measurement, clean rooms, and a partner network of over 900 companies. The LAB program now creates a structured onboarding path for outside builders to connect through that infrastructure.

According to Matt Karasick, Chief Product Officer at LiveRamp: "We're continuing to make it easier for partners to bring agents onto our platform, and with it, unlocking more selection and easier deployment for customers prioritizing value and returns, all while continuing to build neutrality and trust into data collaboration. The closer we get to streamlining every priority marketers have on their agentic buying checklists, the faster we'll be able to help them drive value from agents, and tap the exponential potential these new tools drive."

The emphasis on neutrality is deliberate. LiveRamp's platform serves customers across competing agency holding groups and brands. Maintaining infrastructure that can serve all of them without favoring any single participant is central to the company's commercial positioning, a point that has also been a focal question in the context of the pending Publicis acquisition.

The infrastructure that makes LAB possible

The LAB program does not arrive in isolation. It sits on top of infrastructure that LiveRamp has assembled systematically over the past nine months.

The October 1, 2025 launch of agentic orchestration established the foundational layer - a system allowing marketers and partners to connect agents through APIs, with those agents gaining access to LiveRamp's identity resolution, segmentation, and measurement capabilities. That announcement came alongside two other AI features: AI-Powered Segmentation, which allows marketers to create audience segments using natural language prompts across first-party, second-party, and third-party data; and AI-Powered Search for the Data Marketplace, enabling natural language queries across available data products.

In January 2026, LiveRamp expanded its Data Marketplace to include data and models specifically designed for AI applications, adding licensed training datasets, pre-built AI models, and AI-powered applications to what had previously been a primarily advertising-focused marketplace.

Then in April 2026, LiveRamp added NVIDIA GPU infrastructure to its clean rooms, enabling AI partners and brands to train and deploy models at up to 15x the speed of CPU-based environments, without exposing underlying data or model weights. That upgrade directly addresses one of the practical constraints on agentic workloads: compute capacity. Agents that need to run inference against large datasets benefit materially from GPU-optimized infrastructure.

Taken together, the sequence runs from orchestration framework (October 2025) to data availability (January 2026) to compute capacity (April 2026) to partner ecosystem (June 2026). The LAB program is the outward-facing layer of a technology stack that has been building from the inside out.

Context: the broader agentic advertising landscape

The advertising technology industry has been moving toward agentic infrastructure across multiple fronts. As PPC Land has tracked across its coverage of agentic advertising standards, LiveRamp played a foundational role in this effort when it donated the User Context Protocol to IAB Tech Lab in November 2025. That protocol became one of seven components consolidated into IAB Tech Lab's AAMP initiative, formally named in February 2026.

The broader pattern involves platforms competing to become the infrastructure layer on which agents operate. Newton Research's own product history illustrates how tightly the partner ecosystem has been woven into that infrastructure from early on - Newton Research launched an agentic analytics integration with Snowflake Cortex AI in November 2025, demonstrating that its agents were not LiveRamp-exclusive, while still deploying within LiveRamp's governed environment.

The LAB program's emphasis on a pilot structure with limited release reflects a measured rollout approach. LiveRamp is not opening the program to all comers immediately. The company states it will continue to build on the success of the Founding Partners by opening LAB to limited release, making it available to more marketers and builders over time. Parties interested in the program are directed to contact LAB@liveramp.com.

Pending acquisition context

The announcement comes approximately one month after Publicis Groupe agreed to acquire LiveRamp in an all-cash transaction valuing the company at an equity value of $2.5 billion - $38.50 per share, representing a 30% premium to LiveRamp's closing price on May 15, 2026. The transaction, which requires regulatory approval and a LiveRamp shareholder vote, is expected to close before the end of 2026.

The LAB program lands as LiveRamp's product team continues to operate independently ahead of that closing. Whether a partner ecosystem built around neutrality and open API access changes character once the company is integrated into a major holding group is a question the advertising industry will be tracking closely.

LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP) is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company reported total revenues of $194.8 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2026, a 10.7 percent increase year-over-year, and serves over 835 direct customers globally across a network of more than 900 partners.

Timeline

Summary

Who: LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP), headquartered in San Francisco, California, along with four Founding Partners - SemantIQ, Newton Research, Akkio, and Datalinx - and existing customer Albertsons Media Collective.

What: LiveRamp launched the LiveRamp Agent Builders (LAB) program, a structured initiative allowing third-party AI companies to connect purpose-built agents to LiveRamp's platform via APIs and MCP servers and make them available to LiveRamp's full customer base. The program covers marketing use cases including audience building, media analytics, cross-media measurement, first-party data preparation, and activation workflows.

When: The announcement was made on June 17, 2026, during a pilot period in which all participating agents are accessible to LiveRamp customers.

Where: LiveRamp operates from San Francisco with offices worldwide. The LAB program operates across LiveRamp's cloud-based platform, including its Clean Room infrastructure, Data Marketplace, and Cross-Media Intelligence system.

Why: LiveRamp is seeking to accelerate the deployment of agentic AI tools for marketers by expanding the number and diversity of purpose-built agents available on its platform. The structured program lowers the barrier for external AI builders to reach LiveRamp's installed customer base - more than 835 direct customers globally across a 900-plus partner network - while giving marketers access to a broader range of agent-driven capabilities within the governed infrastructure they already use for identity, measurement, and data collaboration.