Inside WPP’s new agentic AI platform and what it means for brands

WPP on Thursday launched WPP Open Pro, an agentic AI platform that enables marketers to plan, create and activate campaigns without formally engaging an agency.

On the surface, the value proposition is simple: Marketers with relatively limited resources can access cutting-edge AI tools and WPP data and capabilities. But for WPP, it hits three birds with one stone.

It acts as an entry point for future clients, offering a “lite” version of agency services that can expand as their businesses (hopefully) grow.

“It allows us to work with clients who we might not have previously worked with because of our scale. For some of the more emerging or growing businesses, now we’ve got a solution to offer them,” Matt McNeany, president of WPP Open Pro and head of the Open Pro project, told The Current. “We’re really seeing it as a big growth-driver for us.”

It’s also a way for WPP to further unlock more value from the investments that have gone into Open, WPP’s flagship AI solution used by its agencies, such as the $400 million pledged to use Google’s AI models like Gemini and Veo (which are baked into Open Pro).

The third goal may be less deliberate, but arguably more critical: freeing marketers to focus on the questions that will shape the future of their work.

“Open Pro streamlines some of the activity, and it creates a bit of space and capacity for clients to come to our agencies and ask us some of the bigger questions: In an agent-to-agent world, what’s the role of brand? What’s the future of customer experience? How is media going to work?”

What is WPP Open Pro?

WPP Open Pro is a more “focused” version of Open. The simplicity is intentional, according to McNeany.

“It’s a tool designed for rapid activation to get the work done. But it doesn’t do everything. It’s not designed to do everything,” McNeany said.

It’s designed for campaign implementation and lower-funnel activation; the type of work that happens after the strategic thinking has already been done (ideally, by a WPP agency).

The interface is part Canva, part Google Ads and part WARC news feed. From insights to ad creation to deployment, it’s an all-in-one interface. That centralized approach looks very appealing in today’s disconnected media landscape.

“People are appreciating the connected workflow, because otherwise you’re putting work on the client to join up those different sections,” McNeany said. Some of these point solutions, they create more work. The work required to feed them and take the stuff out of them is much greater than the work you save by using them.”

Who is it for?

While there is ostensibly “no minimum-size criteria for it,” prospective user groups fall mainly into two camps.

The first group is global brands whose local marketing teams may not have the resources to manage all aspects of a campaign.

“Now we can develop work centrally and then empower those teams to use Open Pro to build their own local campaigns and versions of it,” McNeany said.

The other group is growing businesses, like tech startups, which might have compact teams of experienced marketers but aren’t ready to invest in a large marketing department or engaging with an agency.

What both groups have in common now is access to a direct-to-client solution that taps into the data and capabilities of one of the world’s largest agency holding companies. Is it Software as a Service? Or perhaps, Agency as a Service?

A glimpse of the future

Tech-adjacent acronyms aren’t too helpful, said McNeany, as they tend to carry baggage with them.

Instead, there is a case for Open Pro lighting a new path for agency revenue models — a “hybrid” one, he said.

“You pay for what you use. The feedback we’re getting from clients is that’s a very compelling model. It’s simple to understand. There are other ways that clients consume our services and that don’t really lend themselves to an output or usage-based model, because it’s more about access to the talent. So, I would expect that we have a blended version of models in the future.”

Ultimately, what WPP Open Pro really is — beyond the “agentic AI platform” label — is a proclamation.

“AI is changing the marketing services model. There hasn’t been a lot of clarity about what that looks like,” McNeany said. “This is WPP taking quite a bold and transformational step. We’re going to put some definitions in the market of what an AI-powered, agentic solution looks like.”