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

WPP has rolled out more than 28,000 AI agents, but scale is only part of the story. The other: how to hardwire control into these systems even before they’re autonomous.

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 to keep tens of thousands of AI agents from drifting out of line — inside the company and beyond its digital walls.

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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