AI agents are learning to buy things. They just don't know who they're buying for.
That's the problem Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun is trying to solve with an approximately $2.3 billion all-cash acquisition of LiveRamp, a data platform that connects consumer identities across 25,000+ publisher domains and 550+ platform and technology partners. LiveRamp is designed to stitch together activity across devices and channels — such as mobile browsing, ad interactions, and in-store transactions — to resolve them to a single person-based identity. That kind of identity stitching has always mattered for ad targeting and matters significantly more when the thing doing the targeting is an AI agent that's also completing the purchase.
LiveRamp generated about $681 million in revenue last fiscal year, primarily from subscription-based services, with roughly 1,390 employees. CEO Scott Howe will stay on and report directly to Sadoun.
Howe has been making the case that this kind of data plumbing is what AI agents will actually run on. "You're collecting the signals that are the fuel for any future outcome-based agentic marketing models," he said in a recent video. He also argued that no company has a complete picture of consumer behavior across every channel, which is the whole reason an independent identity layer exists in the first place.
The deal lands at a moment when agentic commerce, meaning AI agents that don't just recommend products but actually buy them on your behalf, is moving from concept to reality:
- Visa completed hundreds of secure agent-initiated transactions with partners last year and found that nearly half of U.S. shoppers already use AI tools for at least one shopping task.
- OpenAI launched instant checkout in ChatGPT so users can complete purchases without leaving the conversation.
- Experian built Agent Trust, a verification system specifically designed for AI-driven purchases. "Agentic commerce will not scale without trust," Kathleen Peters, Experian's Chief Innovation Officer, said. "What's required is verifying the agent, the human behind it, and their intent to purchase."
Publicis is not the only ad giant that sees this coming. Omnicom just rebuilt its Omni platform into what it calls an AI-native marketing intelligence system. GroupM, WPP's media investment group, launched an AI-powered operating system called "Open Intelligence." Three of the largest ad holding companies are making the same bet at roughly the same time, that whoever controls the data infrastructure AI agents depend on will control the next era of advertising. The difference is Publicis wrote an approximately $2.3 billion check to own the infrastructure outright rather than build it from scratch.
That check comes with a real tension though. LiveRamp was valuable in large part because it was seen as neutral. Brands, publishers, and rival agencies all used it because no single holding company owned it. Now Publicis does. The deal announcement promised LiveRamp will "remain interoperable" and that no customer will be restricted from using its services. Industry observers expect that rivals like Omnicom may reconsider their use of LiveRamp. And Mathieu Roche, CEO of identity provider ID5, has publicly raised concerns about the contradiction, arguing that Publicis touting this as a competitive advantage while also promising neutrality is difficult to reconcile.
On the strength of this deal, Publicis raised its 2027 and 2028 net revenue growth forecast to 7% to 8%, up from 6% to 7%. Sadoun is betting that owning the identity layer is worth whatever network effects it loses by no longer being independent. Whether he's right depends on how fast agentic commerce actually scales, and whether the agents that show up will need a third-party identity graph at all when Google and Amazon already have extensive first-party data on hundreds of millions of users.
The advertising industry spent the last decade fighting about cookies and consent banners. Now it's facing a much bigger question, which is what happens when the thing making purchase decisions is software. Publicis is betting roughly $2.3 billion that identity resolution becomes the most valuable layer in that world, and every major holding company seems to agree with the thesis even if they hate the approach. The real competition isn't Publicis versus Omnicom though. It's all of them versus the platforms that already know who you are without needing a third-party graph to figure it out.
