WPP's Chief AI Officer Just Called the Industry's Agentic AI Boom a 'Teenage Sex' Moment. Most People Talking About It Are Not Doing It.
WPP chief AI officer Dr Daniel Hulm told the IAB UK AI growth summit that agentic AI is in the 'teenage sex phase' where everyone thinks everyone else is doing it. When pressed, agency traders, planners and campaign managers admit they are still in pilot or building the business case.
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.
Dr Daniel Hulm, WPP's chief AI officer, gave the most honest read on agentic AI we have heard from a holdco executive this year. Speaking at the IAB UK AI growth summit, he said the industry is in the "teenage sex phase of agentic AI". Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it. When you actually look, they are not.
The past 12 months of trade press has been a wall of agentic launches. Holdcos announcing AI operating systems. Ad tech vendors launching agentic campaign creation. Consultancies publishing frameworks. CMOs giving keynote speeches about the autonomous future. But when Hulm asked the people who are supposed to be deploying the tech, the answer was usually some version of: we are exploring it, we are in pilot, we are building the business case.
Hulm was not arguing that agentic AI is hype. He was arguing that the volume of announcements has outrun the volume of operational work. That is a different and more useful claim. Programmatic had it. The DMP wave had it. Customer data platforms had it. Now agents have it.
Why it matters
If you are an Australian marketer reading the trade press, the impression you get is that everyone else is shipping AI agents into production. That impression is almost certainly wrong. The actual deployment rate is much lower than the keynote rate suggests, and Hulm's read from inside the biggest agency network on the planet confirms it.
That is good news. It means you have not missed the window. It also means you cannot rely on competitive pressure to set your budget. The brands that are quietly building one or two agentic workflows that actually do work will pull ahead in 18 months. The brands that buy three AI platforms because the announcements made them nervous will end up with $400K of unused licences and a board that no longer trusts the function.
Of agentic AI announcements from holdcos, vendors and consultancies, with operational deployment running well behind the trade press
What to do about it
The quiet implication is the most useful one. AI is the most important shift to hit marketing in a decade. It is also the slowest to embed properly. Those two things are not in conflict. They explain why everyone is talking about it and nobody is yet winning at it.