WPP Says AI Augments, Not Replaces. It Has 10,656 Fewer People.

TL;DR

The Financial Times reported on September 1 that WPP will cut up to 1,000 more jobs by the end of 2026, on top of roughly 11,000 since the start of 2025. WPP's own filings put the group at 97,388 people on June 30, down from 108,044 at the end of 2024: 10,656 fewer. The cuts are phase one of Elevate28, a plan to collapse the holding company into four units running on WPP Open, its agentic marketing platform, and to bank £500m of gross annualised savings by 2028. AI is the stated destination. The revenue line says clients walked out too, and the rival that took them, Publicis, grew its headcount.

What the FT reported

Per the FT, as relayed by Investing.com and HRKatha, WPP plans to eliminate up to 1,000 additional positions in the second half of 2026, sell non-core businesses, and shrink its London footprint from three buildings on the south bank of the Thames to two. The FT frames it as AI-driven cost-cutting across an industry where clients spend less because the tools make the work cheaper.

The number is less a scoop than a confirmation. Ad Age reported in July that WPP would shed between several hundred and nearly 1,000 roles by year-end, most likely in the mid-to-high hundreds, about 1% of the workforce, concentrated in back-office functions and at the creative agency VML. The savings were to be redirected into "automation, generative artificial intelligence, technology infrastructure and integrated client solutions." The FT put a ceiling on the figure and added the property plan.

The headcount, from WPP's own filings

You do not need a paywalled scoop to see the shape of this. WPP's interim results for the first half of 2026 and its 2025 preliminary results give the timeline in the company's own numbers.

Average headcount in the first half was 97,490 against 105,958 a year earlier. Staff costs fell 5.9% to £3,469m. Severance fell too, £44m versus £86m, because the big cuts had already landed. The one people line that grew was the incentive pool: up 120.3% to £130m. The bonus pool got rebuilt while the org chart got pruned, which tells you who Elevate28 was designed to keep.

One caveat the headline number hides: WPP's headcount also drops when it sells businesses, and 2025 included disposals. "11,000 jobs cut" is a reporter's framing. "10,656 fewer people" is the filing's arithmetic, and it counts everyone who left for any reason.

Elevate28, the plan the cuts belong to

CEO Cindy Rose unveiled Elevate28 on February 26 alongside 2025 results that showed revenue less pass-through costs of £10,176m, down 5.4% like-for-like. The plan is to stop being a holding company. WPP now runs four operating units, WPP Media, WPP Creative, WPP Production and WPP Enterprise Solutions, across four regions, with Ogilvy, VML and AKQA under the Creative umbrella. The programme targets £500m of gross annualised cost savings by 2028 and is expected to cost about £400m in cash over two years.

The 2026 goal is £250m of gross run-rate savings by year-end, which WPP says equals about £100m in-year. Run-rate versus in-year is the bit to get straight, because both numbers will be quoted at you. Cancel a £10-a-month subscription in October and you have saved £120 a year on paper but £30 on this year's statement. WPP is booking the £120 as run-rate and the £30 as in-year, and the £500m headline is the paper number.

First-half restructuring charges were £83m, £59m of it new Elevate28 spend. Full-year cash restructuring costs are guided at around £250m. Disposals are expected to raise more than £200m.

Where the AI actually is

WPP Open is the platform the whole plan hangs on. The interim report calls it "WPP's central operating platform, increasingly driving day-to-day workflows, automating high-volume creative, production and media activation." In January WPP said Open had more than 75,000 users, over 90% of client-facing staff, and launched an Agent Hub with four "super agents" (Brand Analytics, Behavioural Science, Creative Brain, and one called the Analogies Agent) on top of "thousands of bespoke AI agents" that teams had already built. We asked our own analogies agent to sit the rest of this one out.

Q2 added partnerships with Google, Meta and AWS, a "Cultural Intelligence Engine" built with Google Cloud, and HEX, a roughly 50-person "frontier studio" inside WPP Production for generative and agentic AI, gaming and robotics. Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis is quoted on the WPP Open page calling it "one of the best applications of Gemini that I have seen so far."

WPP Production is the unit to watch. In February, Hogarth merged with content producers from across the network into a single unit that, per the preliminary results, "will now operate on a single platform, harnessing WPP Open's production technology and AI-powered workflows." It is also the only one of the three agency units that grew in the first half.

Read that next to the automation sentence above. The unit whose work is "high-volume creative, production and media activation" is where the platform does the most, and it is where revenue held.

The part AI does not explain

WPP's fourth trust principle, published this quarter, reads: "AI augments human creativity rather than replacing it." The company that wrote it is 10,656 people smaller than it was 20 months ago. Both things can be true, because the shrinking has a second cause. In July 2025 WPP lost Coca-Cola's North American media account and Mars' $1.7 billion global media business to Publicis, cut its guidance, and, per eMarketer, watched the shares hit their lowest since 2009. Top-25 client revenue fell 6.3% in the first half of 2026 against what the filing calls "client assignment losses from the prior year." Fortune reported the stock has since dropped out of the FTSE 100 after nearly 30 years.

Publicis, which picked up those accounts, does not run the same play. Its 2025 results claim 5.6% organic growth, an 18.2% operating margin and "around 114,000 professionals"; Campaign put the year's staff increase at about 5,800. Publicis's own line is that AI "is not a headwind for Publicis, but a strategic driver of growth and margin expansion." Same technology, opposite headcount curve, because Publicis is adding revenue and WPP is defending margin.

The rest of the industry is moving WPP's way. Omnicom announced 4,000 redundancies in December after closing the IPG deal, folding DDB and MullenLowe into TBWA and FCB into BBDO. In February it doubled its synergy target to $1.5 billion by mid-2028, $1 billion of it from labour, with combined headcount headed to about 105,000 from 128,000 at the end of 2024. Dentsu is cutting 3,400 overseas jobs, 8% of that workforce. The FT's tally, per HRKatha, is at least 18,000 jobs gone across Omnicom, Dentsu and WPP in 18 months.

What a builder should take from it

• The agencies are selling the platform, not the people. WPP's four units now share one system, one data layer (Open Intelligence) and one agent library. If you sell creative or production services to brands, you are increasingly bidding against a workflow, not a team, and the workflow is priced on volume.
• "High-volume" is the exposed tier. WPP's own words for what Open automates are high-volume creative, production and media activation. The work that wins Cannes Lions (WPP collected 140 this year) stays on humans for now. Price your craft and strategy as craft and strategy, and do not compete on volume with an agent hub.
• Growth still hires. Publicis added thousands while running the same AI pitch. Headcount follows revenue; AI sets how many people each pound of revenue needs. Cuts at a shrinking company are not proof that AI shrinks companies.
• Trust principles are a product spec. "Clients own and control their data" and "WPP Open is open by design" are commitments made because brands demanded them. Any tool you sell into a marketing team will face the same two questions first.

Key Takeaways

• The FT reports WPP will cut up to 1,000 more jobs by the end of 2026; Ad Age flagged "hundreds to nearly 1,000" in July.
• WPP's filings show 97,388 people at June 30, 2026 versus 108,044 at the end of 2024, a 10,656 drop that includes disposals.
• Elevate28 targets £500m of gross annualised savings by 2028 at a cash cost of about £400m; 2026's in-year saving is about £100m.
• WPP Open, with 75,000-plus users, is what WPP says automates "high-volume creative, production and media activation." WPP Production, built on it, was the only agency unit that grew in H1 (+1.6%).
• Revenue fell 4.7% like-for-like in H1 and top-25 clients fell 6.3% after Coca-Cola and Mars moved to Publicis, which grew headcount to around 114,000.
• Omnicom (4,000 cuts, $1bn labour synergies) and Dentsu (3,400) are on the same path; by the FT's count the three have shed at least 18,000 jobs in 18 months.

Sources: Investing.com: WPP to cut up to 1,000 jobs by year-end (FT), HRKatha: WPP to cut 1,000 more jobs, WPP 2026 Interim Results (PDF), WPP 2026 Interim Results, WPP Strategy Update and 2025 Preliminary Results, WPP RNS: 2025 Preliminary Results, WPP: Agent Hub on WPP Open, WPP Open, Media Marketing: WPP to eliminate several hundred more jobs (Ad Age), Fortune: WPP's sweeping restructure, eMarketer: WPP cuts outlook amid client losses, Publicis Groupe: Full Year 2025 Results, Yahoo Finance: Omnicom to cut over 4,000 jobs, Storyboard18: Omnicom doubles synergy target, People Matters: Omnicom $1bn labour savings, PPC Land: Dentsu cuts 3,400 jobs