Interpublic will be announcing later today the launch of a new offering called Agentic Systems for Commerce (ASC).  

IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky highlighted the service on the company’s second quarter earnings call earlier today. 

Krakowsky said the service is designed to help CPG brands manage their commerce ecosystems “in ways that are not possible without automation and artificial intelligence. ASC does this by using our proprietary agentic system and the powerful data from Intelligence Node, the company we acquired earlier this year.” 

The IPG chief said the platform captures data signals for products and competing products down to the SKU and store level. It also “ingests insights into consumer searches, digital shelf position, product page content, pricing, inventory levels, and more,” he added, “all in the service of optimizing sales and margin performance across the digital commerce ecosystem for a brand.” 

ASC is being piloted by close to two dozen clients “with results to date that have shown double-digit improvements in impressions and sales,” per Krakowsky. 

He also discussed how clients are responding to various macroeconomic issues and reported that “marketers as a whole are not reacting reflexively to the changing business and geopolitical landscape.”  

That said, assessments are ongoing and vary by client and category. “Our overall experience in Q2 and the first half has netted out at levels that are consistent with what we expected, and we have not seen a marked change in net client activity,” he said. For those and other reasons the holding company is standing by previous full-year guidance of an organic revenue decline of between 1% and 2%,” signaling sequential improvement in the second half of the year.  

It is also likely that given some client wins this year the company will head into 2026 with “tailwinds,” versus the headwinds it faced at the beginning of this year due to several major losses in 2024.  

Krakowsky also gave an update on the company’s operating system Interact, introduced last fall, noting that over half of company employees are utilizing the system (most on a daily basis) as a tool to create images, media plans, and numerous other work and workflow-related tasks.  

He noted that Interact is SaaS-enabled, which allows clients to access the platform as part of their "engagement with our teams, or to perform work directly on their own.” With the latter, he noted, “we now have an avenue to generate technology and software fees, not only remuneration for labor time. “  

When asked about performance versus time-based compensation, he replied that over half of the company’s media contracts now have provisions for performance-based compensation.