AI adoption in ad industry needs ‘non-optional mandates’, says Interpublic CEO Philippe Krakowsky

Interpublic Group CEO Philippe Krakowsky, speaking on July 17 at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah.

Generative AI tools clearly hold great potential for advertising and marketing—recent data from Forrester show 61% of U.S. agencies are already using them, while 30% are exploring use cases. But, as the analyst house also noted, some ad agency employees are still resisting the technology.

According to Philippe Krakowsky, CEO of Interpublic Group (IPG)—one of the biggest players in the ad world—the solution is simple: agencies have to overcome resistance “in the same way that you get people to show up back in the office past the pandemic.”

“There clearly do need to be non-optional mandates,” Krakowsky said Tuesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah. “You’re clearly expecting of folks that they’re going to be going deep and putting all the technology to use in their day-to-day, and that’s actually a KPI that a lot of our operators are measuring against. They’re making it clear to people that they’re going to be comped against that.”

For Krakowsky, generative AI tools are useful for coming up with ideas and iterating on them, but can also form the basis of innovative products for IPG clients.

By way of example, the health-focused IPG agency Area 23, which was working for a client that was launching a new Alzheimer’s drug, developed a tool called bAIgrapher that would turn interviews with Alzheimer’s patients into AI-generated biographies of their lives, to help try to spark memories.

And a separate IPG creative agency, Performance Art, came up with a generative AI system called The Greatest Guide to help brand and market mom-and-pop food stalls in Mexico City that are customers of Performance Art client Grupo Bimbo, the world’s biggest baked-goods firm.

“We’re a professional services company and [IPG’s challenge is] can we become a tech-enabled professional services company?” said Krakowsky.

However, although Krakowsky favors dragooning his group’s creatives into adopting generative AI, he also acknowledges that the new technology could threaten their profession.

“A big risk to all of this is reversion to mean,” he said. “If everybody has all those tools, at what point can you really start doing things that use them to innovate and to break through? Because if not, everyone here is [legendary ad firm and current IPG property] McCann Erickson.”

That said, Krakowsky suggested “really high-end creative people” will remain secure. “The rest of us aren’t making movies like Scorcese, no matter how many tools we’ve got,” he said. “I’ll take that bet for a while yet.”

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