The digital advertising industry is entering exciting and uncharted territory. As artificial intelligence evolves from simple automation to sophisticated agentic systems capable of making millions of autonomous decisions per second, the ecosystem needs new infrastructure to support this transformation. LiveRamp has donated the User Context Protocol (UCP) to IAB Tech Lab, marking a pivotal moment in the development of open standards for the agentic web.

IAB Tech Lab is excited to bring the value of existing standards to the agentic conversation, starting with this donation, which becomes part of our Open Source Initiative. UCP joins other Tech Lab open-source innovations, such as OM SDK, ads.cert, Trusted Server, in Tech Lab’s GitHub repository.

Open-source projects aren’t just about making code publicly available – they’re about establishing transparent, inclusive governance that ensures long-term trust and collaboration, which is why a lightweight Commit Group will govern UCP. To ensure agility and rapid adaptation, IAB Tech Lab will provide support for the contributors to the initiative and apply existing relevant standards to the UCP, such as the Data Transparency Standard, ensuring data quality and transparency, and both the TCF and Global Privacy Protocol to ensure agents are sharing data in a privacy-compliant way with proper signaling. This work will enable the industry to adopt and demonstrate the value of these new technologies quickly, and to contribute to open standards that define how intelligent agents exchange data and user context in a trusted and transparent way.

What is the User Context Protocol?

UCP (User Context Protocol) is an open standard that defines how intelligent agents in advertising exchange signals—identity, contextual, and reinforcement information—that represent a consumer’s real-time intent and response to advertising. Unlike traditional text-based exchanges, which are too slow for modern programmatic advertising, UCP leverages embeddings — compact, learned vector representations that efficiently encode complex signals in a privacy-preserving, interoperable format.

Embeddings can be thought of as the universal language of AI systems. They map relationships between words, ideas, or images so the system can think in context, not just keywords. Rather than exchanging thousands of raw data points or verbose text descriptions, agents can communicate through dense vectors of 256-1024 dimensions that capture semantic meaning, enable transfer learning across systems, and support the sub-100ms response times required for real-time bidding.

IAB Tech Lab believes that standards are essential to this evolution, and this donation of UCP will accelerate its existing AI pillar of work, alongside the very different, but AI-centric CoMP initiative and other foundational development that will be critical for the agentic web.

Why Standards Matter in an Agentic Web

The emergence of agentic AI fundamentally changes how advertising operates. Marketers will have agents, publishers will have agents, tech platforms will have agents, and ultimately, every consumer will have agents. In this new paradigm, advertising systems need to:

• Process billions of signals per second across the entire decision-feedback loop
• Enable different AI agents to understand each other’s learned representations
• Maintain consumer privacy while exchanging meaningful intent and response data
• Support real-time optimization without massive prompt contexts
• Create interoperability between independently developed agent systems

UCP addresses these challenges by standardizing how agents exchange three critical signal types:

Identity signals encode who the user is through hashed identifiers, behavioral segments, and historical patterns without exposing raw personal data.

Contextual signals capture what the user is doing right now—the content they’re viewing, their device, time of day, and real-time engagement patterns.

Reinforcement signals capture how users respond to advertising through impressions, clicks, conversions, and deeper engagement metrics, which continuously improve model performance.

AI isn’t simply a tool for greater efficiency—it’s challenging the fundamentals of how marketing works. Identity, consent, creative, audiences: these pillars of the industry must be reexamined in light of rapidly evolving technologies, but that can be accelerated by ensuring that the models and agents rely on existing standards that have created a transparent and trusted open web.

Consider consent management, as an example. Today, it’s typically handled through consumer-facing banners and policy pages. But in a world where autonomous agents act on behalf of consumers, the industry will need to collectively agree on what consent means when a consumer’s only point of contact with a company is through a single agent-to-agent interaction. UCP’s specifications for privacy-safe signal exchange, consent controls, and agentic attestation help address these fundamental questions.

What’s next?

AI is not a magic bullet or an instant remedy for the long-standing challenges the industry faces. Building the next chapter of marketing will require collaboration across the ecosystem, effective governance that builds on and extends existing standards, and a shared commitment to making AI both effective and trustworthy.

As autonomous AI systems become critical actors in digital advertising, standards like UCP will be essential for ensuring these agents can cooperate effectively while preserving user privacy and enabling innovation. With UCP under IAB Tech Lab stewardship, the industry has the open, interoperable standards needed to transform AI’s exponential surge into enduring business value.

Anthony Katsur CEO IAB Tech Lab