LiveRamp's annual RampUp conference has become one of the more interesting gatherings in commerce media. True to the host company's DNA, everything here revolves around first-party data—how to leverage it, activate it, and increasingly, how to share it. So offsite retail media was the star of the show.

It was an impressive crowd. While there, I cornered a few industry peers to get their honest takes on the content, the themes, and the vibe. I'll be sharing my own notes later this week from the session I moderated, but today it's their turn.

Here’s what was being hashed out in the corridor track. 

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"We Say We're A Data-Driven Industry, But Are We Doing Anything With It?"

Nicole Lesinski, E-Commerce Strategy Lead, Frozen Division, Nestle USA

RampUp has been an awesome opportunity for me to connect with current retail media networks that I'm working with, but also new and upcoming ones. I've met with a lot of my current customers, but also I'm meeting with Lyft and DoorDash and partners that I'm just starting to really do a lot of work with.

I was also able to speak on a panel about my partnership with DoorDash and how we're leading the way in clean room activity—how we're sharing data together and really building insights into action.

(Note from Kiri: make sure you’re subscribed to this newsletter to get my recap of the session that Nicole’s referring to, I’ll be publishing that one later this week!)

The data side of it is crazy—how much mining you can do to get these insights. But I think that's a missed opportunity in the industry. We say we're data-driven and we have all this data, but are we doing anything with it? Not all of the time. That's the action that I want to start taking. Especially with our e-commerce partners like a DoorDash or an Instacart—understanding that consumer in a new way -- that’s what I'm charged to do at Nestle. This can help us optimize investment in our go-to-market strategy.

This whole clean room and data capability arena is not a strong suit of mine, and I'm still very much learning in this. But I know it's a huge opportunity for us and for retail media networks. This has been a good opportunity to lean in and to strengthen that muscle.

"Buy Models, Not Just Segments"

Praveen Menon, former Senior Director of Product Management, Bridg (Rippl retail media consortium)

The session I really enjoyed the most was the keynote (with Scott Howe, LiveRamp CEO). What I really liked was that they confronted the vulnerability and the anxiety around AI, but also how we can think about it as a tool to make our lives easier, to do things faster and more efficiently—and how the business models are evolving.

The data marketplace evolution I found really interesting. We build audiences, we put them in these marketplaces. And even though there are these so-called autonomous buying systems, we haven't really seen that intelligence translate into how media is planned and transacted.

Now, the ability to not just buy segments but actually buy models that are trained on that data gets you closer to making that actionable. I can actually execute a strategy within minutes instead of taking hours and days thinking about what is the right data source, how do I construct an audience on top of it, who can I activate that on, how do I measure it. Now I can run that experiment in minutes.

I think that should make it much easier for people to iterate and learn faster and to evolve how they do things. It just lowers the bar of entry for people to use the power and intelligence that's out there—but now it's more accessible for everybody.

"Is an Agent Going to Impact That Overnight? Nope."

Sean Crawford, Managing Director, SMG North America

One of the things that is coming through loud and clear in the industry at the moment is agentic AI, and how that's going to affect retail media, how it's going to affect commerce. Should we all be panicking about retail media dollars coming in, or will it drive incremental growth?

My take, having gone to one of the panels today that really did talk about this in a lot of detail, is that yes, it's going to impact the industry. But is it going to flip it on its head overnight? No. And are we going to see a sudden exodus of people no longer shopping in the way they do today? No, we're not going to see that.

The reason behind that is if you look at where the majority of transactions still take place, it's in a physical store. In grocery, for example, 90-plus percent of transactions are taking place there. So how is an agent going to impact that overnight? It's not. Yes, it will impact the way that retailers run their operations. And yes, broadly AI is going to impact how retail operates. But agentic AI itself isn't going to have a disastrous overnight impact. If anything, it'll be additive.

"We're All Holding Our Breath"

Ian Simpson, SVP of Innovation & Strategy, Sensor Tower

We are at a very weird inflection point in the world of AI right now. There's a ton of adoption, a ton of insecurity, a ton of uncertainty. And at the same time, there are real world applications being made. Agentic is clearly a really big element of conversation, but I don't really think anyone's really figured out how to turn it into something valuable just yet. Activating on it seems nebulous.

Because everyone is absorbing the same information all at the same time, the conversations are very generic. The last time I came to RampUp, two years ago, the cookie was still on the way out. The things that people were dealing with were: what's a cookieless future going to look like? How are we going to handle that? And LiveRamp is here to take the retail media data, which is supposed to solve that, and then make that data available to everybody through the clean rooms. So it was really a sense of "we are all struggling with how we're going to solve this big problem together."

Right now, that's not the vibe. Now the vibe is a lot more like we're all holding our breath to see what's going to happen. And we're trying to take part in it a little bit ourselves too.

Now What

Four people, four vantage points. Ian sees an industry holding its breath. Sean sees a disruption that's more gradual than the hype suggests. Nicole sees a gap between data access and data action. And Praveen sees a future where AI simplifies media planning itself.

I'll be back later this week with my own notes from the session I moderated at RampUp. Stay tuned.