Agency groups’ AI platforms, explained

Are agency holding groups still holding groups? Or are they AI companies?

Over the past year, the largest global ad agencies have increasingly released AI tools aimed at improving workflow efficiency and making it easier for a wider range of clients to engage with creative and media services.

Underlying each holding group’s go-to-market is now a proprietary AI platform, built and trained on audience and campaign data, through which staff can use agents to deploy campaigns or develop strategies.

As part of an effort to collate the agency groups’ AI announcements, The Media Leader has compiled a list of their platforms, along with a cross-section of the additional AI tools currently offered to clients.

As demonstrated, the different AI platforms share overlapping features, including agentic solutions, audience data capabilities, in-flight optimisation, and tools to understand how client brands appear in large-language models (LLMs).

Core to the differentiation of AI products, thus, is the type and quality of data available to clients. WPP has also uniquely expanded its AI platform to pursue business opportunities with SMEs.

Publicis Groupe

Publicis Groupe’s AI platform, Marcel, was released in 2018 in partnership with Microsoft. It is named after Publicis Groupe founder Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet. The platform is designed to connect data from across the company and its 114,000 employees.

Earlier this month, the holding group announced an expansion of its relationship with Microsoft. Not only did Publicis win Microsoft’s global media business without a pitch process, but it is now integrating Microsoft’s 365 Copilot to all global employees and is using Microsoft’s Azure as its preferred cloud provider.

In return, Microsoft is working with Publicis to develop a “full-stack marketing solution that unifies legacy systems, AI agents, and identity-based data” to accelerate business outcomes for clients.

As CEO Arthur Sadoun explained, “We are combining Microsoft’s unmatched technology and AI capabilities with Publicis Sapient’s transformation expertise on top of Epsilon’s industry-leading identity data to deliver agentic solutions that are truly game-changing for clients.”

Sapient itself has an AI platform, Slingshot, which automates software development for clients. Sapient’s AI solutions, integrating with Microsoft Copilot and other products, will be used by customers to embed AI solutions into their business processes.

Meanwhile, Epsilon will be used to inform AI agents with proprietary data. For example, an agent powered by Epsilon could identify high-value customer segments, generate personalised content, deploy campaigns, and optimise spend in real time.

WPP

Perhaps more than any other agency group, WPP has staked its mission on becoming an AI-based partner. Its “clear and focused mission”, as outlined in its February strategy update, is “to be the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands in the era of AI.”

Rather than a holding group, WPP is now situating itself as “a single company” that is streamlined into four operating units (WPP Media, WPP Creative, WPP Production and WPP Enterprise Solutions) across four regions (North America, Latin America, EMEA and APAC), that are “unified by our pioneering agentic marketing platform, WPP Open.”

By 2028, the company “aims to be a simpler, lower-cost, AI-enabled business”.

WPP Open was launched last summer as a “large marketing model” trained on the company’s audience, behavioural and event data, including leveraging its acquisition of InfoSum as a source of privacy-safe data.

By the autumn, WPP had launched Open Pro, an edition of the AI platform that targets “a much wider array of businesses”, including small- and medium-sized businesses and other emerging brands that “may not be in the market for the sort of full-service offer that we typically provide to large multinational clients,” according to CEO Cindy Rose.

Within Open, WPP launched an Agent Hub in February, an internal app store that features a set of “Super Agents” trained on proprietary data to be used for various marketing tasks.

More recently, WPP announced a partnership with Google to co-develop an “AI-assisted” planning tool for YouTube, known as YouTube 5k.

WPP Media is also actively monitoring third-party “advertising intelligence” tools and platforms to help clients understand the core businesses at the cutting edge of AI development for business.

Omnicom

Omnicom’s AI platform, which received an update upon the integration of the recently acquired Interpublic Group, is known as Omni.

The “marketing intelligence platform” includes identity and data infrastructure with 2.6bn verified IDs, a creative and content production infrastructure aimed at scaling personalised creative, and agentic solutions that can “orchestrate intelligence” across creative, media, commerce and measurement.

Former Interpublic capabilities, such as the audience solution Acxiom, are core to the new Omni’s ability to surface real-time commerce signals and to provide a shared view of consumers.

Omni’s CEO is Duncan Painter, who commented upon the relaunch in January that, while the solution “connects the full breadth of marketing”, its “power” is derived from its human workforce.

“Omni is built to support strategists, creatives, analysts, investment managers, media and commerce traders, and client leaders in doing their best work, not to replace their judgment of imagination,” he insisted.

Dentsu

Dentsu’s flagship AI platform is Dentsu.Connect, which just this week received a revamp.

The latest iteration incorporates LLMs, including Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama, and is designed to leverage both internal and external AI agents, linking workflows such as media planning, strategy, and audience-building.

As Ben Gott, Dentsu UK&I’s president of data and technology, told The Media Leader, Dentsu.Connect “acts as a central intelligence layer, connecting media, creative, CX, commerce and measurement into a single, interoperable platform, powered by agentic AI.”

“Rather than positioning AI as a standalone solution, Dentsu has integrated it into everyday workflows, enabling teams and clients to make faster, more confident decisions while maintaining strong governance and human oversight,” Gott said. “The result is an interoperable AI ecosystem that scales, adapts, and delivers impact well beyond incremental optimisation.”

Dentsu has also built a number of proprietary tools, such as GenStudio Dentsu+ (in partnership with Adobe), Generative Audiences, Connected Content, and more.

Havas

Havas’s proprietary AI platform, Converged.AI, is a suite of tools first introduced in 2022 to offer end-to-end marketing optimisation.

Converged.AI is available internally to staff and is applied across all agencies within Havas Village, with client modules also available.

According to a spokesperson, roughly 70% of Havas clients are actively using the platform, which can also be integrated into their own tech stack.

It includes an agentic layer to support adoption and used a dataset with more than 60,000 profiling variables, helping to enable audience creation, analysis, activation and measurement.

Within Converged.AI, Havas’ Brand Insights tool aims to help brands understand how they appear across popular LLMs.

Laura Kell, Havas Media Network UK’s chief data and product officer, told The Media Leader that Converged is “already proving its value” by delivering improved outcomes for clients.

“By making it easier for planners to uncover smarter insights, it’s naturally reshaping how we work,” she added, “streaming planning and elevating impact across Havas, running throughout our media and creative capabilities.

“This opens the door to a more progressive model of remuneration, one tied directly to the uplift we deliver, not just the activity we execute.”

Stagwell

Stagwell’s AI operating system is aptly titled The Machine. First demoed at CES this year, the OS was built by Stagwell’s digital-first agency Code and Theory.

The Machine integrates Stagwell’s existing marketing tools into a single system, as well as third-party tools such as Figma, Slack, Teams, Adobe, and others, via performance dashboards and a unified system of AI agents.

Stagwell has also released additional AI tools, such as the machine learning tool SmartAssets, and Search+, a hybrid suite launched in March that aims to help brands navigate AI search via paid, owned, earned and shared media.

According to Dan Roberts, global SVP of search at Stagwell agency Assembly, Search+ has “already changed how our teams work” by doing the “heavy lifting on understanding brand discoverability, visibility, sentiment, and measurement outcomes in AI search.”

“Our people are now able to spend even more of their time where clients feel the value — on judgement, creativity, and business-changing ideas,” Roberts added.

“As that shift accelerates, agency remuneration has to follow suit, moving toward models that reward outcomes, proprietary AI capability and the quality of human thinking that sits on top of the technology.”

Stagwell has also notably partnered with controversial AI company Palantir in order to add enterprise audience segmentation to its core products.

Brandtech Group

Under the Brandtech Group umbrella is generative AI marketing platform Pencil, which the company claims has generated more than 1m ads for over 5,000 brands, accounting for $1bn in media spend through the platform.

The group acquired Pencil in 2023, five years after its founding. The platform is built on OpenAI’s GPT family of large language models and generates channel-ready ads and copy by ingesting a brand’s objectives, assets, and preferences.

Pencil incorporates AI agents and can aggregate third-party LLMs such as OpenAI’s GPT-5, video generators like Google’s Veo 3, and design platforms like Figma. It is also available via third-parties including Google Cloud Marketplace.

Pencil Pro is a separate product tailored to the needs of global brands.

The subsidiary has developed and produced campaigns entirely using generative AI since 2024.

The Brandtech Group has made other investments in AI and AI-adjacent companies including Crossing Minds, AI Foundation, CreativeX, VidMob, and its 2022 acquisition of Acorn-i. Jellyfish, which Brandtech also acquired in 2023, leads internal training efforts and works with brands on generative engine optimisation.