The real AI challenge for WPP isn’t scale, it’s control 

WPP has already unleashed more than 28,000 agents across its business. Now, it’s racing to keep them in line.

That’s the job of Daniel Hulme, the holdco’s chief AI officer. He’s not focused on flashy demos or one-off tools. He’s trying to engineer the infrastructure that keeps thousands of AI agents from running amok — internally and out in the world. 

This isn’t theoretical. WPP is already deploying agents to handle media planning, content generation, analytics and optimization. For now, their capabilities are limited to helping human employees without agency to full autonomy to access systems and data sources for safety reasons. But the promise of agentic AI involves coordinating numerous AI systems, orchestrating multiple intelligent systems to connect agents across teams, clients and platforms. Without it, the risk of conflicting behavior, redundancy, or outright failure goes up fast. 

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Why brands and agencies are putting AI chiefs in their C-Suites

A new addition to the S&P 500 officer class has emerged in recent months: the chief AI officer, a position defined not by control of key budgets or the size of their team, but their expertise in all things generative, agentic and automation.

IPG’s appointment of Yaniv Sarig as its global head of AI commerce last week was merely the latest in a string of C-Suite hires made by major advertisers and agencies.

In the last 12 months, brands like General Motors, Mastercard and ZocDoc have each appointed chief AI officers while agency holding companies like Stagwell, subsidiaries like Golin and indie shops like Luckie & Co. and Horizon Media have done the same. Adtech firms are in on the trend – Zefr hired a CAIO in February 2024 – as are B2B giants like PwC, S&P and Accenture.

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