"1st party data is dead, we'll use AI instead."

AI is here, and as programmatic before it, it comes with world savers proclaiming that everything else is dead. As a result, way too many content businesses I speak to that could be building a decent 1P data asset are being sold cheap easy lemons by AI businesses. They’re choosing to go with plug and play AI options that claim to be able to build a new world of ad products, instead of taking this literal once in a lifetime opportunity to build out their own data asset (contextual doesn’t count, renting it from a data broker or ID graph doesn’t count). There is a growing narrative that AI makes it less necessary to build an actual 1P data asset (a large hold co even released an article saying AI means ID data isn't necessary 🥴).

Meanwhile, AI redirects are brutalising publishing - as quoted in Forbes “AI search engines send 96% less referral traffic to news sites and blogs than traditional Google search“.

This means one thing: it’s everyone for themselves now.

And that is the precise definition of the overwhelming need for 1st party data.

Saying 'AI tools can replace the need for 1st party data' is like saying bread is going to make wheat unnecessary. It makes no sense.

Data is the raw ingredient that the machine that is AI will be processing, and AI will be the thing that makes first party data what it should have been all along - easy to use, connect and predict from. Bread (manufactured product) is great but it needs wheat (the raw ingredient). So now's the time to refocus on having good quality raw ingredients.

AI does not replace data, it is in fact the machine for processing it in to usable material. Building data assets is not the easy option, but nothing good is easy.

I worry for those who now excitedly implement AI without their own deterministic data anchor. Maybe they'll create great predictive tools to get them their next efficient customer/dollar, but they won't know who their customer is properly, and eventually someone else will swoop in to do just that. In one year from now everyone will have an AI + contextual play so it's also not likely to be defensible as a strategy.

If my hunches are right, in 2026 no enterprise wants their AI products to look, feel, and perform exactly the same as every other offering on the market with no other competitive edge than content - those days are gone. We already did that with 3P cookies and it sucked for publishers.

The moment content owners should re build their house properly is NOW. The best content owners I see and work with right now are the ones investing in tokenizing their visitors in a durable and compliant way. The tech is now there to do this, it's just getting drowned out by AI yelling.

Premium content publishers: we’ve danced the dance of letting intermediaries dilute your assets.

First party data is more or less the only technical defence moat against having this happen again, and trust me - next year will be too late for this.