Richard Knott.
Richard Knott, SVP, APAC for InfoSum.
When I joined InfoSum nearly four years ago, I spent a considerable amount of time explaining to the industry what a data clean room was and why it mattered.
Back then, clean rooms were new, often misunderstood, and seen as a niche solution for data-savvy pioneers preparing for the loss of identifiers, as third-party cookies teetered toward extinction (who knew that can would be perpetually kicked down the road?)
Fast forward to 2026, and the landscape has fundamentally changed.
Data clean rooms are no longer a novelty. They’ve become part of the infrastructure. Just as nobody talks about APIs when booking a flight or streaming a film, the inner workings of data collaboration have faded into the background—absorbed into cloud workflows, adtech stacks, and measurement systems.
As this shift plays out, I expect the term ‘data clean room’ itself to fade from everyday use (yes, even mine). In its place, marketers will focus on what they’re actually trying to achieve: smarter collaboration, faster measurement, better performance, and stronger customer relationships.
After all, no one wakes up thinking “I need a clean room.” They’re asking: How do I connect with the right customers in a privacy-by-design way, how do I measure campaign effectiveness without relying on outdated IDs; and how do I build a richer understanding of a consumer I don’t directly see?
Enter Private Data Networks
This is where Private Data Networks come in.
Where early clean room deployments were often point solutions, built around a specific use case or campaigns, Private Data Networks are strategic and built for longevity. They create an always-on layer of connectivity across multiple brands, retailers, media owners, and data providers, enabling collaboration without moving or pooling data. Each party retains full control. Privacy is protected by default.
Just as importantly, they represent a shift in mindset.
A decade ago, in the era of ‘big data’, stockpiling and ring-fencing data was the dominant strategy. Proprietary datasets were treated as fortresses of competitive advantage. But today’s marketers are realising that intelligence grows when data is connected, not collected.
No single brand has a complete view of the customer journey. But through privacy-by-design collaboration, they can access richer behavioural signals, stronger attribution paths, and more effective activation strategies, without ever exposing their raw data. And with each new partner or dataset, the network gets smarter. Insights deepen. Measurement improves. Performance lifts.
Why AI Makes This Urgent
The value of secure, privacy-by-design data collaboration increases exponentially in the AI era.
AI is increasingly being embedded in the foundation of the entire marketing infrastructure, shaping everything from creative development to targeting, optimisation, and attribution.
However, it’s important to remember that AI doesn’t create competitive advantage in and of itself. It multiplies what already exists. So, if your data is siloed, your AI will be short-sighted, and models will underperform or, at worst, amplify weak data foundations.
But when AI is trained on insights generated through decentralised data collaboration, it becomes a powerful accelerant. The real intelligence doesn’t come from a proprietary model alone, but from the network effect—the depth and diversity of signals AI can learn from, while safeguarding trust and control.
This is only possible when partners collaborate without moving data, generating intelligence where it already resides, connected but never centralised, ensuring both insight and sovereignty scale together.
As AI becomes the base layer of marketing infrastructure, the role of identity will begin to shift. It won’t disappear, but it will no longer carry the full weight of understanding on its own. Identity will act as a starting point, offering structure and context, while deeper insights will be drawn from behaviour, signals, and intent - interpreted through AI. What once seemed like the complete picture will start to look more like the outline, making privacy-by-design data collaboration even more critical to fill in the rest.
This is the future brands should be rewiring their data strategies for: smarter marketing, powered by privacy-by-design data collaboration, and amplified by AI.