Inside WPP’s new AI play: Turning agency know-how into digital agents

WPP introduced Agent Hub, a new suite of artificial intelligence tools aimed at embedding decades of the company’s institutional knowledge into its day-to-day work for clients and employees. The system, housed within WPP Open, the company’s proprietary AI platform for marketing, functions as an internal app store that converts WPP’s data, strategic frameworks and creative methodologies into specialised AI agents. The company said the goal is to make its collective expertise available on demand to clients and its roughly 100,000 employees worldwide.

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At launch, Agent Hub includes a small group of so-called “Super Agents” designed to support work across branding, strategy and creative development. One agent provides access to nearly 30 years of data from Brand Asset Valuator, WPP’s long-running study of brand equity, which has tracked consumer perceptions of thousands of brands globally. Another draws on behavioural science frameworks developed within Ogilvy to help teams analyse human motivation and decision-making. Additional agents are designed to stimulate cross-industry thinking by drawing analogies from outside a client’s category, or to act as an ideation partner informed by what the company describes as more than a century of creative experience across its agencies.

The rollout reflects WPP’s broader approach to artificial intelligence, which has emphasised tools developed inside its agencies rather than centrally imposed systems. Since the launch of WPP Open, teams across the network have created thousands of custom agents using no-code tools to assist with productivity and creative work. The Super Agents, the company said, are distilled from the most effective of those internal experiments and made available across the organisation.

Executives were keen to stress that the system is governed by strict controls. Each agent undergoes validation by senior subject-matter experts and is reviewed for data licensing, privacy compliance and output quality, measures intended to reassure clients wary of the commercial and reputational risks associated with generative AI.

“Agent Hub is how we deliver WPP excellence at scale,” said Stephan Pretorius, WPP’s chief technology officer. He described the initiative as a way to combine human judgement with machine efficiency, enabling the company to move toward pricing models based on business outcomes rather than billable hours.

WPP said more than 75,000 employees already use WPP Open, including over 90 percent of its client-facing staff. The platform has been adopted by clients such as Nestlé and The Coca-Cola Company, and those clients will automatically gain access to the new agents. The company is also working with select marketers to develop customised agents trained on proprietary data and brand guidelines.

Elav Horwitz, WPP’s chief innovation officer, framed the initiative as an attempt to keep experimentation open rather than opaque. “This is an open canvas, not a black box,” he said, adding that Agent Hub is intended to capture ideas developed across the network and make them broadly accessible.

The launch comes as large agency groups race to define how artificial intelligence reshapes creative and strategic work, balancing promises of efficiency with long-standing claims that insight and originality remain fundamentally human skills.