Omnicom says AI savings are being shared with clients

New Delhi: Omnicom has made agentic marketing one of the three central pillars of its post-IPG growth strategy as it seeks to move artificial intelligence beyond content generation and into the planning, activation, measurement and coordination of marketing work. The agency group said it has unified its data and AI assets through Omni, its operating platform, and is building an agentic layer that can support the creation, activation and orchestration of AI agents across workflows, channels and customer experiences. The proposition is that these agents will not merely generate individual pieces of output. They will operate across connected marketing processes, drawing on audience data, identity systems and measurement tools to assist decisions and execute tasks. John Wren, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Omnicom, identified agentic marketing transformation as the first of the company’s three principal growth opportunities. The other two are emerging consumer-engagement models and the expansion of relationships with existing and new clients. “In Cannes, we demonstrated how Omni’s agentic layer can be used for our clients to enable agent creation, activation and orchestration across workflows, channels and customer experiences,” Wren said during Omnicom’s second-quarter earnings call. “This is further enhanced by Omni’s foundational data and identity layer powered by Acxiom. Through Omni’s agentic and data capabilities, we can achieve significantly better audience and activation strategies and more precise cross-channel measurement,” he added. What Omnicom means by agentic marketing In practical terms, agentic marketing refers to the use of AI systems that can undertake a sequence of connected tasks rather than respond to a single prompt. An agent could, for instance, analyse an audience segment, recommend a channel mix, trigger campaign activity, monitor performance and adjust subsequent decisions within defined rules. Several specialised agents could also be coordinated across creative, media, commerce and measurement workflows. Omnicom has not disclosed a detailed commercial breakdown of how much revenue its agentic products are currently generating. Wren also acknowledged that the technology remains at an early stage. “We’ve been using AI and generative AI for a long time now. What’s made easier is as we look at the agentic environment, which is nascent, and it’s going to be something that will be part of the future and will be rolling out. In a large part, these are tools,” he said. Omnicom is positioning agentic marketing as a strategic direction and infrastructure layer rather than claiming that autonomous systems are already running entire client marketing operations without human oversight. Its immediate application appears to be in making workflows more consistent and efficient while improving the quality of decisions through access to connected data. Paolo Cerruti, who oversees AI and technology at Omnicom, said agentic workflows were helping the company on both efficiency and effectiveness. “From an efficiency perspective, deploying agentic workflows is helping facilitate work in a far more efficient way, driving consistency across the decisioning that we’re doing across our platforms in Omni,” Cerruti said. “From an effectiveness perspective, because of the underlying assets, the data assets and the identity assets fuelling those agentic workflows, it’s driving to better results and better outcomes for our clients,” he added. Clients reinvesting savings into marketing Wren said clients were generally reinvesting the savings generated through AI efficiencies into marketing rather than removing the money from their budgets. “In large part, any savings clients are deriving, they are in fact reinvesting immediately into the marketplace,” he said. He linked this reinvestment to Omnicom’s focus on measurement, arguing that the company was able to show clients what their marketing activity had achieved. The claim is significant for the agency business. One of the central commercial concerns around AI is whether faster production and automated workflows will reduce agency revenue by shrinking the cost of marketing activity. Omnicom is arguing instead for a reinvestment cycle: automation lowers the cost of some tasks, the agency shares some of those savings with the advertiser, and the advertiser then uses the released budget for additional activity. Acxiom data becomes foundational layer The acquisition of IPG has given Omnicom control of Acxiom, which provides the data and identity foundation beneath the company’s agentic ambitions. Omnicom’s pitch is built around the combination of this identity infrastructure with Omni, its media, commerce, creative and measurement capabilities, and its relationships with technology platforms. Wren said Omnicom’s marketing-transformation consultancy and technology partnerships would help clients modernise their own enterprise infrastructure and connect it with Omni. “Our assets and capabilities create a unified intelligent layer that is the foundation for true agentic marketing,” he said. This means Omnicom is not limiting its role to supplying agencies with AI tools. It is also seeking a larger consulting and systems-integration role inside advertisers’ organisations. That could include helping brands connect internal data, customer platforms, marketing technology and external agency operations so that AI agents can act across a broader marketing system. The strategy also fits the structure of the enlarged Omnicom. Integrated media, which includes media, commerce, data, customer relationship management, consulting and content automation, now contributes 52.5% of the company’s core revenue. Integrated media generated $3.15 billion of Omnicom’s $6 billion in core revenue during the second quarter. Traditional advertising contributed $942.6 million, or 15.7%. Agentic workflows are therefore being introduced into a business where media, data and commerce already account for a far greater share of revenue than conventional advertising. Omnicom rejects the idea that AI will replace agencies Wren used the earnings call to push back against predictions that AI would displace large parts of the agency-services business. “Ultimately, the shorts and everybody else who have been out there saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, this service business is going to be replaced by AI,’ don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said. He also argued that the cost of deploying AI had not been sufficiently factored into some predictions about its impact on agency economics. “The other thing the marketplace hasn’t seen is what the cost of this AI is. That’s going to weigh into the equation as well. It’s changing every moment,” Wren said. Omnicom’s position is that AI will change how agency work is produced and delivered, but will function primarily as a tool within a broader service and technology model. That still leaves important questions for advertisers around pricing, transparency and accountability. Greater efficiency could reduce the amount of human time required for certain tasks, while the cost of data, platforms, models and AI infrastructure could create new charges. Omnicom has not disclosed a universal commercial model for agentic services. Its comments, however, indicate that at least some efficiency gains are being passed back to clients. “What we’re doing is, where there are savings, we’re sharing them with our clients, for sure. We’re still in the early stages of this,” Wren said. Agentic marketing becomes a merger thesis Omnicom’s agentic strategy is also becoming part of the rationale for its acquisition of IPG. The combined company brings together Omni, Acxiom, agency talent and capabilities across media, commerce, consulting, creativity, production and technology. “Over the past eight months, we’ve moved beyond combining our two companies to building the leading connected marketing and sales company for a fundamentally new era of marketing,” Wren said. “We’ve aligned leadership teams, connected our capabilities across the enterprise, and unified our data and AI assets through Omni,” he added. Omnicom is continuing to invest in the platform even as it extracts substantial cost savings from the merger. The company is targeting $900 million in cost-reduction synergies during 2026 and $1.5 billion by the middle of 2028. Chief Financial Officer Phil Angelastro said the 2026 target included continued investment in Omni and other areas of the business.