Ep 262: Adam Tucker of WPP - "The Creative Industries and AI - Part 9"

Does your AI do what you need it to do?

This episode is part of a series of conversations I've been having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Over the last few weeks, I've been focusing my study of leadership through a single lens, the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries. I'd planned on ending the series with my interview of Sir John Hegarty, but I recorded two bonus episodes during Cannes that I felt were an important part of the conversation.

Adam Tucker is the Global Account Lead at WPP for Mondelez, and he reached out to me after listening to the first few episodes in this series. He pointed out that while we were focusing on how AI will impact the process of how the creative industries work, we hadn't talked about how it is already changing the work itself. WPP has made a significant investment in AI. The press reports that it's spending about $318 million annually in WPP Open, a set of AI capabilities that are now available to its 35,000 employees around the world. Adam explained why from his perspective, this investment creates a competitive advantage.

I'm not an AI expert, nor have I seen WPP Open firsthand, to pass any judgment on its capabilities, and whether it is in fact superior to other forms of AI that are publicly available. This conversation is not intended to convince you whether WPP has created a competitive advantage or not. What it does establish is one clearly differentiated benchmark in the ecosystem of AI that are now springing up across the creative industries, and therefore, it provides one measurement against which to evaluate your own relationship with artificial intelligence.

I'll wrap this series this week with one more bonus episode and then a recap. In the meantime, thanks for listening.