Inside WPP: Brand and design in the AI era

Having spent 12 years at leading brand consultancy Landor, including six as global CEO and two as WPP’s chief client officer, Jane Geraghty was appointed global CEO of WPP Brand & Design earlier this year, alongside her role as Global CEO of Landor. Here, she speaks to Transform editor Jack Cousins about how WPP is evolving in the age of AI, why differentiation matters more than ever and how leaders can thrive in a rapidly changing world.

Firstly, I wanted to understand what WPP’s stance is on agentic AI. How do you see it shaping the future of creativity, and how has it changed the way WPP operates?

I think we've been ahead of the game on AI. We were early movers, and we've built our agentic platform, which Landor named Open. It's open by name and open by nature, designed to be interoperable with our clients. We have a strong view that a closed ecosystem isn't the way forward because it doesn't serve our clients. That's probably one of the key ways our approach differs from some of our competitors.

AI has profoundly changed everything we do. In the early stages, like everyone else, we focused on efficiency, speed and productivity. But we're now at a point where our agentic roadmap is fundamentally changing how we work. The real power of AI lies in connecting things that couldn't previously be connected.

That openness extends to our partnerships. We work with leading technology partners, giving us access to new tools and capabilities. It's a collaborative ecosystem that brings together our specialist expertise, our clients' needs and our partners' technologies, all powered by the layer we call Open Intelligence.

As part of our agentic journey, we acquired InfoSum to create it. Open Intelligence enables us to derive actionable insights from multiple data sources without moving the data itself. One of our CEO Cindy Rose's trust principles is that clients own their data, and we fully support that. Instead of moving or monetising it, we combine WPP's proprietary data with clients' first-party data and data from our partners. That allows us to generate actionable insights that inform all of our work while maintaining trust and data ownership.

How tricky is it for brands to maintain distinctiveness in AI-driven environments?

I think there's a differentiation crisis across most categories. We've seen that over the last decade, or even longer. My view is that we have to address that regardless. We need to focus our marketing efforts on driving growth through meaningful differentiation. Brands should be the valuable differentiator.

I also think AI, and the way we're approaching it, should give our brands a competitive advantage. What matters now is building brands that are distinctive and powerful enough to drive business, move people and influence agentic choice. If you understand how to connect all of those elements together, you'll create a genuinely differentiated brand.

We know from the evidence that highly differentiated brands grow around two-and-a-half times faster than those that aren't. I also think there's a renewed sense of energy and focus among many of our major clients when it comes to differentiation, which is encouraging because that's something we do particularly well.

 

One crucial new discovery is that brands now must speak to both human and machine audiences. Tell me about that and how, at WPP, you’re achieving that?

I think we embrace it. We can see this is the direction of travel, and it’s something we welcome. The shift is, in a way, about applying the same principles across a broader spectrum.

When we look at brand equity in an automotive brand, for example, we have decades of data that tell us how people feel about it, and how differentiated and relevant it is. We can measure brand strength very precisely. We are now applying that same rigour, thinking and tooling to LLMs. 

What’s interesting is what we’re beginning to see across different categories: where there is a difference between how people perceive a brand and how LLMs interpret it, and whether that difference is beneficial or problematic for a given category.

That’s the next frontier. We can now measure it and understand it. And we can see clearly that consistency, the systematic application of your brand, simple, differentiated and credible claims, and where your brand shows up are all critical factors. Credibility, in particular, is essential for brands to stand out, be differentiated and be recommended by agents.

It’s almost as if the craft, quality and emotional richness of branding help us move people, while the consistent and intelligent application of the system helps convince agents. You have to do both.

With all these new exciting technologies, do you think there’s a risk the importance of craftsmanship gets lost in the design process?

I think AI is helping us conceptually design faster than we’ve ever been able to before. But you still need to man the machine and guide it towards a differentiated space. And once that’s done, you then need to move into the craft of whatever the solution looks like.

Whether with people or agents, you need to express the brand vividly and holistically in order to win. In the past, that was largely visual and verbal. Now it’s much more multifaceted.

We’re seeing a significant rise in sonic branding as an opportunity to differentiate, and a growing emphasis from clients on experience as a way of expressing a distinctive brand. So, as branding practitioners, we need to build much more comprehensive and coherent brand systems that are consistently delivered across all of these touchpoints.

Craft and creativity remain central to that. 

As a global CEO, do you think the way people lead organisations like WPP has to change in the AI era?

I do think leadership is changing. I’ve always been a hands-on leader, and I’ve always believed you have no business leading if you don’t fully understand all the elements that go into the work. I’ve often said I would never ask anybody in my company to do something I wouldn’t do myself.

That said, the speed of change can feel overwhelming at times. I think the leaders who thrive in this environment will be those who are constantly learning. If you believe leadership is about command and control, I think that will become increasingly challenging.

I’m always open to learning from the people around me to understand what this technology is capable of. In fact, I think it’s essential.

I also think the shape of our teams will change. Rather than traditional hierarchical pyramids, I think we’ll see many more pods and squads that are connected, collaborative and constantly learning from one another. It will be a profound shift away from the old hierarchies.

For leaders, that means being curious, staying close to the work and recognising that expertise can come from anywhere.

 

This article was taken from Transform magazine Q3, 2026. You can subscribe to the print edition here.