How WPP, The World's Leading Ad Agency, Is Transforming Itself With AI

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Jun 3, 2025

Josh Newman, the Global Head of People Strategy & Experience at WPP, shares key insights into the ad giant's transformative journey. With a staggering 100,000 employees, WPP is reimagining its workforce using AI. He discusses the Workforce Intelligence Project, which streamlined 60,000 job titles to under 600 roles, enhancing productivity. Josh emphasizes the evolving concept of 'M-shaped workers'—employees with diverse skill sets. This revolution aims to drive growth, innovation, and client service in a rapidly changing work landscape.

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INSIGHT

Massive Job Role Reduction

WPP reduced 50,000 job titles to 600 core roles covering 84,000 employees.
This massive simplification allows for streamlined HR and workforce planning.

INSIGHT

M-Shaped Workers Concept

WPP is developing "M-shaped" workers skilled in multiple specialties, beyond traditional T-shaped roles.
These workers can orchestrate new AI-integrated workflows and deliver higher-value work across functions.

INSIGHT

Super Workers Drive Reinvention

Top performers adapt their roles continually as AI evolves, becoming champions of reinvention.
Talent functions should identify and incentivize these "super workers" as role models to raise standards.

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This is a fascinating conversation with Josh Newman, the Global Head of People Strategy & Experience, at WPP. WPP, the world’s leading advertising agency, has around 100,000 employees and a fascinating agency-specific organization around the world. Josh explains the business and operating model for WPP, and how it became an $8.1 Billion market cap business.

Over the last year WPP’s board wanted to look at the workforce and find ways to improve productivity (“the Workforce Intelligence Project”). Josh explains how WPP took this sprawling, high-performance company and developed an enterprise-wide “work-design”, using its own AI and help from a new vendor Reejig, to understand what everyone was doing.

This effort enabled WPP to radically simplify its job families and prepare the jobs and roles for the company’s new AI platform, WPP Open. (As you’ll hear, WPP went from 60,000 job titles to fewer than 600 as the company streamlines operations for its new AI platform WPP Open.) This is work simplification at massive scale.

This kind of work is now essential to every company as we look for ways to embrace AI. And as you’ll hear, the WPP Workforce Intelligence project has helped people find new jobs, advance their careers, and better pinpoint HR investments in the right place. The end result will be a company with higher growth, profitability, innovation, and client service.

If you’re a business leader, HR professional, consultant, or CEO you should listen to this discussion. Josh describes precisely how they accomplished this transformation and explains how AI is “preparing WPP for AI.”

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to WPP and Its Role in the Future of Work 05:36 Workforce Intelligence and Job Redesign Project 10:23 Leveraging AI for Job Architecture and Efficiency 15:05 Mapping Roles and Tasks for Enhanced Productivity 20:18 The Concept of M-Shaped Workers 25:11 Validating New Job Structures and Roles 30:19 Business-Driven Workforce Intelligence and Its Impact 35:06 Future-Proofing Organizations Through Continuous Learning

Additional Information

The Rise of the Superworker: Designing You Company for AI

The End of HR As We Know It? AI Is Starting To Change Everything.

Galileo Learn: The AI Professional Development Academy for Leaders