As the adtech industry works to become more AI-enabled and agentic, the IAB Tech Lab yesterday announced the release of the User Context Protocol (UCP) — a proposed open standard designed to create an architecture for AI agents to share user-related signals.
Think identity signals (hashed IDs, behavioral segments), contextual signals (content being viewed, time of day), and performance signals (impressions, clicks, conversions). The goal: to balance effective signal sharing with privacy as we move toward an agentic, robot-powered ad future.
The protocol was gifted to IAB Tech Lab by data company LiveRamp, marking another step in the broader industry effort to establish common frameworks for AI. Similar initiatives are underway from companies like Yahoo and PubMatic, which have backed standards such as AdCP—an offshoot of broader AI frameworks like MCP and A2A. (Still with us?)
Why This Matters:
To drive a car, you need roads. These new protocols and standards are meant to build those roads for AI agents.
If an agent is the car in this analogy, the standards create the infrastructure it drives on—allowing agents to navigate, communicate, and reach their destinations. We’ve heard about agent-to-agent roads and workflow roads, but user signal roads haven’t been discussed much until now. That’s what makes this move from IAB Tech Lab—and the companies supporting it—an important step forward.
Experts React:
With every new proposed standard, there’s bound to be confusion over whether it duplicates or conflicts with existing ones. Some have already asked how UCP aligns with AdCP.
In response, Tony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, clarified on X:
“UCP is a derivative of AdCP, whereas AdCP focuses on direct media orchestration, and UCP focuses on audience and ID orchestration.”
Here’s a useful post from Simon Harris on how this could complement AdCP:
Our Take:
The adtech industry is moving fast to adopt agentic technology and build the infrastructure needed to support it. The open question is whether advertisers will move just as quickly—and whether agentic systems will prove easier to use, but potentially trickier from a transparency standpoint.
Still, “move fast and figure it out” might be the right strategy here. If agentic adoption accelerates across both B2C and B2B environments, it’s a smart move for adtech to get ahead of the curve now.
