Usually Chief Technology Officers aren’t part of the executive lineup on numbers-focused quarterly earnings calls but Omnicom’s CTO Paolo Yuvienco was given some time earlier this week on the company’s Q2 presentation to talk about the firm’s progress integrating an agentic framework throughout company processes over the past year.  

“We can now orchestrate intelligent agents across the campaign lifecycle,” Yuvienco told analysts on the call. And along that lifecycle, he added that the agents will collaborate seamlessly to analyze data, optimize strategy and refine creative elements.  

He noted, for example, that strategy and creative teams “across all agencies” are incorporating so-called synthetic audience agents that are grounded in data infused within the firm’s Omni platform. This allows teams to create synthetic focus groups to develop campaign ideas as well as personalized content creation and even pre-launch testing of campaign assets.  

He noted that the firm’s Health group has developed something called a “multi-agent reasoning engine” to recalibrate campaigns at significantly greater speed when market conditions change. How does that work? “By simulating market scenarios and modeling stakeholder responses,” explained Yuvienco.  

The digital commerce team has created agents to assist with product launches. The agents help to optimize strategy and produce insights including market data, sales trends and competitor analyses.  

Given the exponentially enhanced efficiencies, analysts wondered how those efficiencies would be shared with clients or effect pricing models.  

Wren responded that pricing models would “increasingly shift to outcomes.” He didn’t go into detail but he’s also not the first executive to suggest that shift. Along with all the other disruption that AI is bringing to the industry, it seems certain that the technology will render the hourly rate model obsolete.