The news: LiveRamp is positioning itself as neutral infrastructure in what CEO Scott Howe calls a coming “war for signals.”

• In an EMARKETER interview, Howe argued that the next decade of AI in advertising will hinge less on model superiority and more on access to proprietary data.
• The competitive edge, he said, will come from integrating first- and second-party signals, including CRM data, transaction histories, and customer cohorts, into AI environments.
• Howe said LiveRamp’s role is not to build the models, but to act as the connective layer that securely moves data between brands and AI endpoints.

Why it matters: As AI systems proliferate, differentiation is shifting from algorithms to inputs.

“AI doesn’t have knowledge itself,” Howe said. “It has to get its knowledge from actual humans.” Public data can train models, but proprietary signals shape outcomes.

Marketer behavior supports that view. More than half of global CMOs report enriching first-party data with identity solutions, while 52% of US B2B marketers plan to invest in data unification.

In that environment, infrastructure providers are positioning themselves around data connectivity rather than model-building. LiveRamp’s clean room tools, for example, are designed to help brands combine first-, second-, and third-party data and activate it across search, commerce, and emerging AI interfaces. Howe argued that AI-driven workflows can compress tasks like audience segmentation from weeks to near real time, though the practical impact will depend on integration depth and governance constraints inside large organizations.