WPP is planning to cut up to 1,000 more jobs by the end of 2026, on top of roughly 10,600 already gone since the start of 2025. Headcount has dropped from about 108,000 to under 97,400. Across WPP, Omnicom, and Dentsu combined, at least 18,000 jobs have disappeared in eighteen months, with AI named as the reason each time.
The sentence worth sitting with is this: WPP's own CFO, explaining where the savings actually come from, said plainly that most of it will come from people costs. Not from efficiency gains reinvested into better work. From people.
Why we're naming this in public
We work with practices at the opposite end of the size scale from WPP, but the logic being tested at 97,000 employees is the exact same logic being pitched to a ten-person studio: use AI to do more with fewer people, call the savings innovation. At WPP's scale, the company survives that trade, because it still has tens of thousands of people and hundreds of accounts left. At the scale of a small creative practice, that same trade doesn't leave you leaner. It leaves you without the people who were the actual reason a client hired you.
There is one honest counterpoint in the same data. Publicis added close to 6,000 people over the same period, growing while its competitors cut. Its growth is attributed to real organic revenue performance, not an explicit AI-maximiser strategy, and we won't overstate that. But it is proof, in the same industry, under the same AI pressure, that shrinking is a choice, not a law of physics.
Where we stand on it
We think the WPP CFO's line deserves to be read as a warning label, not a case study to copy at a smaller scale. If an AI adoption plan starts with a target headcount reduction instead of a target for what the remaining team gets to stop doing, it's a replacer plan wearing a maximiser's language. We build the other kind.
This is the same standard behind every system Shery builds through Aparato. See what that actually looks like →