Goodway Group and Optable Partner to Feed AI Agents Cleaner Data

Data platform Optable has inked a partnership with independent agency Goodway Group to bring AI-driven planning and measurement tools on top of the agency’s fragmented data systems, the companies said.

The partnership reflects a broader shift across advertising, as agencies look to apply AI agents to media workflows while running into more fundamental constraints on the quality and organization of their underlying data.

Optable began as a data clean room provider, a secure, privacy-controlled environment where advertisers and publishers can analyze shared data without exposing their underlying records. Now it is positioning its platform as an infrastructure layer that unifies first-party, third-party and campaign data.

On top of that foundation, the company has built AI agents—powered primarily by Anthropic’s Claude—that allow users to build audience segments, analyze performance and generate insights conversationally, Andrew Dumas, chief business officer at Optable told ADWEEK. 

Goodway has begun rolling out the platform to roughly 70 of its roughly 350 employees, primarily across media planning and analytics teams, with plans to expand usage over time, said Michael Wolk, senior vice president of growth and partnerships at Goodway Group.

“The use case that the team’s leaning into right now is getting campaign briefs from clients and designing specific audience segments and attributes based on those briefs,” he said. 

The rollout comes as agencies grapple with increasingly fragmented data environments, particularly as retail media networks, social platforms and programmatic channels generate large volumes of disparate signals. While AI agents promise to make that data easier to use, their effectiveness depends on how well it is structured and normalized.

“AI on top of fast, wrong data is still wrong,” Wolk said. “In a world where AI is accelerating everything, if you don’t have the right foundation for intelligence and data, you’re accelerating a lot of the wrong things.”

Clean rooms aren’t going away

The partnership also underscores the continued role of data clean rooms, which some industry observers have suggested could become less relevant as AI adoption grows. Optable and Goodway instead describe AI as a foundational layer—enabling secure data sharing and making sensitive datasets, such as transaction-level retail data, usable within AI systems.

“You can’t have a sustainable LLM without a proper clean room,” said Tom Swierczewski, vp of media investment at Goodway Group. “There’s currently 38 different privacy regulations in the United States alone. They’re only going to be on a rise consistently.”

New skillset 

For Goodway, deploying AI agents is also changing how teams interact with data. Rather than navigating dashboards or manually querying datasets, planners are now required to increasingly work in conversational interfaces. 

This entails asking “good” questions, refining prompts and iterating on outputs, according to Wolk. 

“A conversational environment is a very different experience with technology and data—it’s a new muscle and skill set for practitioners,” Wolk said.

Executives said the technology is expected to improve efficiency over time, though they acknowledged an initial learning curve as teams adjust to new workflows. For now, success is being measured through adoption, time savings and driving sales. 

“AI is directional at best—sometimes poorly directional, sometimes reasonably accurate,” Optable’s Dumas said. 

That shift is also changing how audience building happens in practice. Where media teams once manually queried datasets to create segments, AI agents are beginning to take on that role.

“In the old world, someone would type in, ‘We want to create a segment of people who bought a bagel in the last 30 days and retarget them,’” Dumas said. “In the agentic world, you’re talking to an agent that sits across all these datasets, organizes them and proposes audiences for you.”