Publicis Aims to Create Smarter AI Agents With $2 Billion LiveRamp Deal

French advertising company Publicis has acquired artificial intelligence data platform LiveRamp .

The $2.2 billion deal is aimed at making Publicis a “leader in data co-creation, an important capability in the age of artificial intelligence and an enabler of agentic business transformation,” the companies said in a Sunday (May 17) news release .

As the release noted, LiveRamp is a global data collaboration platform that let companies “unify, manage, and activate” data across the digital space, connecting more than 25,000 publisher domains and 500+ technology and data partners in 14 markets. It also allows brands, retailers, media platforms and data providers to safely and effectively collaborate and connect data.

A report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) about the deal characterized the acquisition as Publicis trying to tap a rising demand from companies that want to transform their businesses by deploying AI agents that can complete tasks autonomously.

“We did not need LiveRamp to win in the marketing space,” Publicis CEO and Chairman Arthur Sadoun told WSJ. “Where LiveRamp plus Publicis is going to make a difference is in the agentic space, in this new market where there is huge opportunity because there is a huge barrier created by data.”

LiveRamp allows companies in different industries to scan data across different sources and transform them into actionable data assets, the report added.

“There is no way you can win with agents if you don’t have the right and differentiated data,” Sadoun said. “For agents to be competitive and to work, they have to run on good data, data that is unique, actionable, connected.”

In other agentic AI news, PYMNTS wrote Monday about the technology’s use in the banking world, following Fiserv’s launch of agentOS, an operating system that lets financial institutions deploy and manage AI agent s across core banking, payments and servicing workflows.

The infrastructure here, that report added, is “moving faster than the rules,” with the Financial Data Exchange launching an initiative focused on what happens when AI agents handle consumer financial data autonomously.

“The problem it is trying to solve is structural. When a consumer connects a bank account to a third-party app, the consent is visible and deliberate,” PYMNTS added.

“When an AI agent does the same thing on a consumer’s behalf, the questions multiply: who authorized the agent, what data can it access, how is that permission tracked and who is liable when something goes wrong. The standards that govern consumer financial data sharing today were not written for that scenario.”