Mark Read: 'AI will unlock adland's productivity challenge'

WPP chief executive Mark Read has said there is unlikely to be any part of its business that will not be "touched by AI one way or another in time".

Speaking as part of a panel at a Google event on March 17, Read said: “It’s about augmenting human creativity, not about replacing people, but giving people the power of AI.”

Read was appearing alongside Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud, Sir Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, and Allison Kirkby, chief executive of BT Group, at an event taking place at Google DeepMind’s offices in King’s Cross. The panel was moderated by British broadcaster Tina Daheley.

Read added that “we have a productivity challenge”, which, over time, AI would unlock.

Kirkby argued that AI agents perform better than people at customer service. She said: “We are quietly reinventing all of our operations on the back of what AI can do, and we are seeing it dramatically improving customer service and our ability to sell our products and services.”

The panel outlined updates and products within Google Cloud using DeepMind technology, Google’s AI laboratory and the importance of putting the UK at the forefront of AI progression. 

Hassabis contended that it is now "more important than ever that the UK is at the forefront of AI technologies both economically [and] geopolitically, to influence how these technologies end up getting deployed and used around the world”.

Kurian emphasised the importance of building large data centres in the UK, for which Google Cloud has made a $1bn (£769m) investment, to “host these solutions and models here in the UK so that you can keep your data in the country and meet regulations to train and serve models right here in the country”.

Read went on to highlight WPP Open, the holding company’s intelligent marketing operating system powered by AI, in partnership with Google DeepMind.

He explained that WPP uses AI to drive insights, generate ideas for brainstorming creative sessions with clients. “Sometimes clients write very long briefs, and we can shorten them extremely quickly into things that people understand. We can use AI to produce millions of variants of work much more cheaply than we could before, or to create media plans and optimise media plans in real time," he said.

"I was playing with Veo 2 [Google’s video generation tool] the other day, getting a duck to fly around the Moon in response to a client question.”

He claimed that WPP has created 280 hours of video this month at a far lower cost than previously. He also revealed that 41,000 people use the WPP Open platform every month and that Ogilvy's London office was closed for a day last year to train the creative agency on AI. “We have people who think of themselves now as sort of AI-powered planners, rather than just planners. When people get used to it, I think a lot of the fear goes away," he said.

In addition, Kirkby said that 50,000 of BT Group’s employees use AI productivity tools every day. She added: “We've seen some of the biggest productivity gains in our software developers. We see some of the best areas of re-application for consumer benefit is in blocking scams.”

Hassabis, who started DeepMind in 2010, said by the end of the year, more agent-based systems will be being used. Over the next five to 10 years, he predicted that “a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore, and we'll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence – a system that's able to exhibit all the cognitive capabilities that humans can". 

He said that the video and image models being built will bring a “new way of creating”, adding: “The next era is going to be with creative talent embracing these technologies, it will become a superpower.” 

Google Cloud’s updates include Google’s audio generation model , Chirp 3, joining its machine learning platform Vertex AI. It will be available in 31 languages, offering 248 voices with eight-speaker options.

Google Cloud is also expanding its UK data residency commitment to include Google Agentspace, with availability coming in Q2. Google previously provided UK organisations with the option to store their data at rest and conduct machine learning processing using Google’s large language model, Gemini 1.5 Flash, within the UK. Agentspace aims to further enterprise expertise for employees with agents that bring together Gemini’s advanced reasoning, Google-quality search, and enterprise data.