Jane Austin: are Publicis and WPP on different sides in the humans vs robots debate?
Two sides are battling it out to own the future of the industry: AI and humans. The question is who’s going to win? Before Cannes, I’d have said the answer was obvious: It’s the agentic AI, stupid.
Now, after hearing two very different takes on the matter from two of the most powerful leaders in the industry, I’m not so sure.
Listen to WPP boss Cindy Rose and you’ll back the robots. Rose told an audience assembled at Campaign House at Cannes on Monday: “I’m not getting requests from clients for additional human staffing, I’m getting requests from clients for better growth outcomes.”
Au contraire, says Arthur Sadoun. The Publicis CEO claims that clients are desperately seeking humans. Also speaking at Campaign House on Monday, he said: “What I’m loving at the moment is that in every pitch we are in, every client is telling us now, whoa, they are charging too much in technology and not enough in people. We want more people in our business.”
Sadoun also defended a parody video Publicis sent out urging the industry to stop making false AI-fuelled promises to clients in pitches, or what’s been termed “AI pitch-maxxing”.
Publicis, which has a reputation for aggressively bidding down prices during media reviews, has been criticised by competitors for being hypocritical on this issue.
Sadoun said he was disappointed by the reaction to the video. “What we wanted to do is to for people to understand that we have collectively gone too far in promising things on AI that our client, at the end, doesn’t want,” he said.
Sadoun also said he wasn’t convinced by Cindy Rose’s claim not to have seen or read about the video, which was sent out by Publicis last week. “She was sleeping for four days?” he joked.
Clearly, the battle lines are being drawn. But can the industry make up its mind which side it’s on? For Cindy Rose it’s not about taking sides. “A lot of creativity is based on human imperfection, which it turns out AI doesn’t do very well,” she said. “So you need both, and I think the idea that it’s one or the other is just not realistic.”
What the WPP boss did offer was this chilling descriptor for what the industry will look like in the years to come: ‘the human to agent hybrid space’. “There’s a lot to learn as we move into the human to agent hybrid space,” she said. If that’s what we’re calling the workplace of the future, my money’s back on the robots for the win.
Jane Austin is the founder and owner of Persuasion Communications.
