Inside the brand and agency scramble for first-party data in the AI era
By Kimeko McCoy • January 9, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
New year, same problems. Even with Google’s U-turn to keep third-party cookies in Chrome, the race for first-party data hasn’t slowed. If anything, generative AI has accelerated this long-term trend by promising to lower the barrier to entry, allowing internal teams to process, ingest, and normalize more data faster.
Brands and their agency partners are still pushing to own their first-party data as opposed to relying on third-party walled gardens, like Meta or Google, experts say. The trend is evidenced by a sharp increase in the number of clients asking that first-party and other data signals be shared with cloud environments for clients to manage themselves, according to Nate Carter, vp of digital sales for Dun & Bradstreet.
Carter estimates those requests hovered around five for the entirety of 2024 and then skyrocketed to 10 per month in 2025. He’s not the only one who has noticed this trend.
“The effect of all of this hype around AI and large language models and so forth, has put the spotlight on the importance of data, especially in marketing,” said Andrew Frank, research analyst at Gartner. He added, “And it has driven a lot of companies to think more carefully about control and ownership of their data.”
‘Data hungry’ brands
More often, brands and their agency partners are turning to methodologies like AI-powered synthetic audiences and media mix modeling. Brands are “data hungry”, as Carter says, to fill in any data gaps, and create a complete picture of how to best use marketing insights.
And it’s not just the data itself. Agency execs say clients are increasingly looking to own more of their data infrastructure, including tech stacks and data clean rooms. Google’s back and forth (before it finally walked back its plans to keep third-party cookies in Chrome), agency hold co consolidation, market fragmentation and other macro economic factors have created a new sense of urgency in the data ownership conversation, agency execs say.
It’s a trend amongst Fortune 500 brands that have invested heavily in internal data infrastructure, but smaller financial service companies, retail brands and technology companies are making similar moves, Carter said without listing specific client names.
“AI certainly plays a role in this in that if a brand or company wants to build out its own LLM or start utilizing the capabilities of these different AI platforms, like behind their own firewall,” said Christopher Robinson, head of insights at Tinuiti.
From data collection to data management
The scramble for data insights, namely first-party data, isn’t new. The post-GDPR/cookie deprecation era sparked the push to collect data. Now, brands are increasingly boosting their existing data systems via cloud management programs (think Snowflake or Google Cloud Platform).
Agency execs say it’s changed the relationship from one of agency-managed data to agency partners becoming strategic consultants on how to use and manage data for marketing strategies. The agency pitch has become more about how first-party data can be used, measured and what AI-powered tools are most effective.
“It’s no longer just about reporting, in my opinion. It is more about interpretation. What does this mean? Help me understand storytelling,” said Anita Patil-Sayed, managing director and head of analytics at Canvas Worldwide, referring to the changing client-agency relationship.
Meanwhile, agentic AI is likely to continue the in-house trend, per experts. It’s not that clients will leave their agency partners. But as platforms like Salesforce Agent Force or Microsoft Copilot Studio promise to act like data management platforms for marketers, agencies become more strategic partners than hands-on data management operators.
“Most brands, clients, will want to continue the trend of wanting to take better ownership over their first-party data, signals collection, data warehousing, data governance, and building that competency,” Robinson said. “I don’t see that trend changing.”
