Behind the rise of agency chief AI officers

As they race to overhaul their businesses for the future, ad agencies are adding a new role to the C-suite: AI czar. A raft of holding companies and agencies have recently appointed chief AI officers, demonstrating how quickly the role is gaining traction across the industry. In the past three months alone, Stagwell and Monks named CAIOs, while Interpublic Group of Cos. created an executive position focused on adding some AI heft to its commerce capabilities. Horizon Media and Momentum Worldwide, an experiential shop within IPG, have also appointed AI leaders. The position means different things to different agencies. Some AI executives are focused on overhauling internal operations, while others concentrate on working with clients, selling products and vetting partnerships. Many of these executives are also responsible for educating and training employees, along with managing ethics and governance. The rise of AI-focused titles is a reflection of tech’s ubiquity in the industry, said Nicole Greene, an analyst at Gartner. AI is “being sprinkled everywhere, and now it needs the strategic focus to actually see business results,” she said. Different approaches Most AI chiefs have experience in data and automation, but not all of them come from traditional agency backgrounds. Yaniv Sarig, the new global head of AI commerce at IPG, co-founded and spearheaded e-commerce tech company Aterian until 2023. After working with Sarig in a consulting capacity, IPG created a position to bring him on board full-time. Daniel Hulme, meanwhile, was named WPP’s CAIO in 2021, when the ad giant acquired his tech company Satalia. The reporting structure varies based on the agency, too. John Kahan, Stagwell’s newly minted CAIO, reports directly to Chairman and CEO Mark Penn, while Horizon Media Head of AI Solutions Tim Rich works under Rich Arenaro, the independent agency’s chief technology and information security officer. Some agencies (WPP, Horizon Media) have a chief technology officer and an AI czar, while others (Momentum Worldwide) put both areas under one title. Some AI leaders exist as a department of one, plugging in as needed across the agency, while others have robust teams. Sarig, who is initially focused on commerce shop Kinesso, is working to build a “small” team, in addition to the roughly 150 people IPG has working on agentic commerce systems and resources from Intelligence Node. Sarig will eventually work with all IPG agencies, Jeriad Zoghby, IPG’s global chief commerce strategy officer, said. The goal, Sarig said in an interview, is to create an “agentic backbone” for commerce that all the agencies can adopt. AI needs to be integrated throughout the whole company, not isolated to a single department, stressed Mike Barrett, co-founder of Supernatural AI and chief strategy officer at Supergood, the holding company’s ad agency business. (Supergood employees are mandated to use tech and products from Supercharger, Supernatural’s AI unit.) To be effective, AI chiefs also need the resources and ability to enforce use of the technology, he argued. “If you don’t have budget and you don’t have decision-making authority, you can’t force people to do a thing,” Barrett said. “It’s not happening.” Laying the AI foundation Agencies are pouring millions of dollars into AI, and appointing a dedicated leader helps them realize the full potential of the technology, said Greene. AI chiefs are required to stay up to date with rapid developments and then democratize information across the broader team, educating employees and easing their anxieties, several execs told Ad Age. These people are charged with developing tools and systems that make employees’ and marketers’ lives easier. For instance, Hulme is working on AI agents that help WPP manage things including media buying and back-end office tasks, while Rich is fine-tuning Horizon Media’s data platform, blu, that will soon roll out to all the agency’s clients. How wide the duties stretch depends on the company. Kahan is focused internally, helping beef up the Stagwell Marketing Cloud, which the holding company’s various agencies can then use in their day-to-day operations. “My major remit is not about customer engagement,” Kahan said. “It’s about delivering incredible products.” Responsible robots and partnerships AI chiefs are also responsible for ensuring that the tools they develop are built responsibly and ethically. Hulme, for example, oversees a research unit called Conscium, which is focused on understanding machine cognitivity—verifying that AI systems possess the knowledge they’re meant to have and behave with common sense. Also: Why Agentic AI is a wake-up call for measurement standards “I believe that we’re many years away from building conscious machines, but before we get to conscious machines, we need to make sure that we’re testing machines to make sure they’re operating safely,” Hulme told Ad Age. Rich oversees how third-party AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot are responsibly integrated into the agency’s internal systems—a part of the gig he describes as “interpreter in the world of AI snake oil.” “Everybody and their mama wants to sell us stuff,” Rich said. “Somebody’s got to get under the hood and take a look at that engine to make sure it’s firing on all cylinders. Somebody’s got to get in there and bust that up.” Read: WPP invests in Stable Diffusion owner Stability AI Hiring and managing talent Another key priority for AI leaders is training staffers and hiring the right employees for the future, such as creative technologists, said Monks co-founder Wesley ter Haar, who assumed the CAIO title in February while continuing as chief revenue officer. After ter Haar stepped into the new role, the S4 Capital-owned agency launched “WesleyBot,” an AI recruiter modeled on his personality, which it supported with a paid LinkedIn campaign. (More than 800 people have already chatted with WesleyBot, according to a Monks spokesperson.) In efforts to attract AI-savvy employees, “we’re looking at talent in a few different ways,” said ter Haar. Under ter Haar’s remit, Monks is also rethinking how it gets paid, given how much more efficient AI is making employees. The agency is focused on building smaller, integrated teams supported by AI-enabled workflows, and is experimenting with new incentive models that reward productivity rather than metrics like hours worked, he said. Is a CAIO simply an optics play? Agencies and brands have created roles in response to emerging technologies before, including an influx of chief metaverse officers in 2022. AI likely has more staying power than Web3, but the flurry of recent appointments—all ahead of the TV upfronts and NewFronts—does beg the question: How much of this is marketing and PR? Marketers, for their part, aren’t overly concerned with whether their agencies have dedicated AI leadership, said Nick Primola, executive VP of the Association of National Advertisers’ Global CMO Growth Council. Brands do rely on their external partners for guidance, but roles like the CAIO haven’t yet emerged as a “meaningful differentiator,” he added. AI roles may partly be about “signaling,” but the strategy behind them makes sense, said Barrett. Such positions help agencies centralize budgets and responsibility, in addition to establishing expertise in a complex area. “It suggests that you’re on top of this AI thing that your clients are all asking you about,” said Barrett of these roles. Ter Haar told Ad Age his CAIO title is an optics play. But it isn’t meant to help court clients—it’s about “internal change.” The role stresses the importance of AI and sends a clear message to employees on the agency’s future, he added. “There are few things more powerful than having one of the founders go, ‘This is my role now, because if we don’t figure this out, we might as well not figure anything out. This is essential,’” ter Haar said. Sign up for Ad Age newsletters

Behind the rise of agency chief AI officers

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