WPP has launched Agent Hub on its AI marketing platform WPP Open.
The Agent Hub is an internal app store where users can select AI agents powered by WPP’s decades of data, capabilities and best practices, to assist and perform tasks.
Over the last year, WPP’s employees and clients have been able to create bespoke AI agents on WPP Open, from simple to complex tasks, with tens of thousands created over the last year. The Agent Hub acts as an app store with around 150 ready-made agents available to all users, including four more advanced “Super Agents”.
Chief technology officer Stephan Pretorius told Campaign that the Agent Hub is “the best of WPP” that can be accessed at any time.
Pretorius described the “Super Agents” as moving on from “things that do tasks to almost agentic products”. The initial agents include The Brand Analytics Agent, The Behavioural Science Agent, The Analogies Agent and Creative Brain.
The Behavioural Science Agent was born out of Ogilvy’s Behavioural Practice, run by Ogilvy vice-chairman Rory Sutherland. “This is effectively Rory’s brain in an agent,” Pretorius said.
The Analogies Agent comes out of VML’s strategy team and is based on analogous thinking, finding parallel situations from different industries to foster cross-sectoral thinking to solve client challenges.
Pretorius said the philosophy was to not enforce agency silos, but to make “agency expertise available to the entire business across WPP in a democratic way for the first time”.
He added: “Culturally, it’s very much where Cindy Rose [chief executive] is taking WPP, and where we've been trying to take the business for a long time… seeing the variety and uniqueness of our different brands as a strength as opposed to a weakness.”
Some of the agents are given “Verified” status, which means that the agent does what it’s supposed to do. An issue with agents is that they use deterministic technology. The verification process is run through WPP’s Satalia.
“This is about human brilliance, amplified by AI,” said Pretorius. “Every agent in our Hub is human-driven, encoding the decades of insight, judgement and expertise of our people to solve real client problems. We're supercharging the very best of WPP, ensuring that every strategy is built on a foundation of our collective intelligence.”
All employees and clients with access to WPP Open can use the agents.
Elav Horwitz, chief innovation officer at WPP, added: “Our approach to AI is an open canvas, not a black box. WPP Open’s Agent Hub is how we harness our people’s creative energy, curating the very best ideas and making them available to everyone. It’s innovation, democratised.”
In October last year, WPP launched Open Pro for marketers to create a campaign without an agency, led by Matt McNeany.
