As our industry moves steadily toward an agentic AI environment, one thing has become clear: the underlying infrastructure that supports ad selection and delivery must evolve just as quickly. Automated decisioning, intelligent bidding agents, and real-time signals are rewriting how transactions occur. To keep pace, we need standards that are fast, interoperable, privacy-aware, and built for scale.
IAB Tech Lab has taken a meaningful step in that direction with the addition of the User Context Protocol (UCP) to its Open Source Initiative—made possible through a generous contribution from LiveRamp.
A New Language for Intelligent Advertising Systems
UCP is an open standard designed for the next generation of advertising. It defines how intelligent agents exchange the signals that matter most including identity, contextual cues, and reinforcement data that reflect a consumer’s real-time intent and response.
What sets UCP apart is the medium of communication.
Traditional, text-based exchanges are simply too slow and too heavy for the demands of modern programmatic buying. The future belongs to embeddings: compact vector representations that encode meaning in a secure, efficient format that machines can interpret instantly.
Think of embeddings as the universal language of AI. Instead of passing thousands of raw data points or lengthy descriptors, systems communicate using dense vectors (256 to 1,024 dimensions) capturing nuance, enabling transfer learning, and supporting sub-100ms response times. In other words, this approach finally aligns the ad tech stack with how AI actually operates.
As agentic systems take on more autonomous decision-making, the industry will require standards that ensure efficiency, composability, and trust across the supply chain. UCP delivers on this by offering:
- Interoperability across platforms and partners
- Faster, more efficient ad selection and delivery
- A privacy-preserving architecture aligned with global expectations
- A standardized, open method of exchanging intent-rich signals
This foundational work reflects the infrastructure the ecosystem will rely on as AI begins to influence not just bid strategies, but the entire decisioning and feedback loop.
Sonia Carreno, President of IAB Canada, underscored the significance of this moment for the industry:
“The introduction of UCP marks the beginning of a new era in global standards. As we shift into agentic AI, the industry needs modern, interoperable signal frameworks that can support everything from compliance to supply-chain best practices. We’re excited to work with our members and the Tech Lab community to help define the signals that will operate within this new ecosystem and ensure Canada remains at the forefront of responsible innovation.”
Open Source, Open Invitation
By bringing UCP into the IAB Tech Lab Open Source Initiative, the protocol becomes part of a broader, globally governed suite of industry standards, alongside projects like OM SDK, ads.cert, and Trusted Server.
The code is now live in the Tech Lab GitHub repository, and the community is invited to participate. Contributing to UCP means helping shape the rules of engagement for the agentic web—and accelerating the responsible evolution of AI-enabled advertising.
For IAB Canada members, this is a pivotal moment to stay engaged. As we navigate the next chapter of programmatic innovation, standards like UCP will be central to achieving an efficient, transparent, and future-proof supply chain.