{"id":907657,"date":"2026-05-23T03:12:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T08:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/23\/why-wpps-ai-boss-believes-agents-are-still-in-the-teenage-sex-stage-of-development\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T03:12:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T08:12:51","slug":"why-wpps-ai-boss-believes-agents-are-still-in-the-teenage-sex-stage-of-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/23\/why-wpps-ai-boss-believes-agents-are-still-in-the-teenage-sex-stage-of-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Why WPP\u2019s AI boss believes agents are still in the \u2018teenage sex\u2019 stage of development"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n

By Seb Joseph<\/a><\/span> \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 May 22, 2026<\/span> \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

\n Ivy Liu <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

WPP\u2019s chief AI officer has a theory about agentic AI. It is, Dr Daniel Hulm told attendees at the IAB U.K. \u2018s AI growth summit in the \u201cteenage sex phase\u201d \u2014 everyone thinks everyone else is doing it but when they actually look, they\u2019re not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a crude metaphor. It\u2019s also probably accurate.<\/p>\n

\n

The past 12 months have produced a remarkable volume of agentic AI announcements from across the industry. Holdcos have unveiled AI operating systems, ad tech vendors have launched agentic campaign creation tools. Consultancies have published frameworks, CMOs have given keynote speeches about the autonomous future of marketing. And yet, when the people who are supposed to be deploying the tech \u2014 the agency traders, the media planners ad the campaign managers \u2014 are pressed, the honest answer is usually a version of: \u201cwe\u2019re exploring it, we\u2019re in pilot or we\u2019re building the business case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Agentic AI is not the first technology to get caught in this particular gap, and it won\u2019t be the last. Programmatic was going to revolutionize media buying \u2014 eventually it did, about a decade after the press releases said it would. Data clean rooms were going to helo fix third-party addressability in the open web \u2014 they\u2019re still mostly unlocking it. CTV measurement was going to bring digital accountability to television \u2014 ask anyone trying to reconcile a cross-platform report how that\u2019s going. Every generation of advertising technology gets its teenage sex moment, where the industry consensus outpaces the operational reality by enough to be embarrassing in hindsight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s different about agentic AI is the texture of the gap. It\u2019s not that companies are lying. It\u2019s that almost no one is being honest about what deployment at scale actually requires.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is that companies will deploy an army of [agents] across the organization, and forgive the technical term, but it\u2019s going to be a shit show, because most of those agents are not going to be capable of doing their job,\u201d said Hulme. \u201cAt least 80% of the energy that you need to build agents is testing,\u201d <\/p>\n

The reason that\u2019s especially important in marketing comes down to what Hulme called the second-order gap. Train an agent on historical campaign data, deploy it to make autonomous decisions and it immediately starts changing the very behavior it was built to predict. Inevitably, consumers respond differently, competitors react and media prices shift. The model, without the testing, risks becoming obsolete the moment it starts running. Marketers are not testing whether the agent does what it\u2019s told so much as they\u2019re testing whether what it\u2019s told to do still makes sense after it\u2019s been doing it for a week \u2014 against a market that has already moved.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is that buying and selling didn\u2019t exist in the past.\u201d said Hulme.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019ve now changed the behavior, and marketing is the same thing. If I build a magic oracle and predict human behavior, I haven\u2019t changed that behavior. Now I predict the models are out. You cannot predict the future based on the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of which means the tech isn\u2019t coming. The more important part of Hulme\u2019s argument made that all too clear. The industry, he suggested, is working with the weakest possible version of AI \u2014 think getting computers to do what humans can already do \u2014 when the genuinely disruptive version is systems that make decisions, observe outcomes and adapt. By that standard, the advertising industry is not yet doing AI in any meaningful sense. It is doing very fast, very sophisticated rule following.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is that quick wins and low hanging fruit can be solved by a third party at a fraction of the cost,\u201d said Hulme. \u201cYou need to be focused on the problems and differentiate business.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

\n

\n More in Media Buying<\/span>
\n <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Seb Joseph<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Seb Joseph \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 May 22, 2026 \u00a0\u2022 Ivy Liu WPP\u2019s chief AI officer has a theory about agentic AI. It is, Dr Daniel Hulm told attendees at the IAB U.K. \u2018s AI growth summit in the \u201cteenage sex phase\u201d \u2014 everyone thinks everyone else is doing it but when they actually look, they\u2019re not.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":907658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26794,46,149674],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-907657","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-believes","8":"category-technology","9":"category-wpps"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/907658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}