The Agency Model Is Collapsing. AI Is Picking Up the Pieces.

The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO

The UK ad industry just recorded its worst year for talent loss since records began.

The IPA’s 2025 Agency Census is out, and the picture is really grim. Creative agency employment fell 14.3% in a single year, and almost 60% of people who left actually resigned. They saw the trajectory and walked before they were pushed.

The junior workforce is being gutted. Under-25 headcount shrank by nearly a fifth, and only 43% of agencies even bothered hiring entry-level staff last year, down from 56%. Advertised jobs across the industry fell 41%. The talent pipeline is collapsing.

We saw the same pattern in the US data a few months ago. Junior and mid-level execution roles vanishing while senior and strategic roles hold or grow.

And the cuts are accelerating. 24% of agencies now expect to reduce roles directly because of AI this year—triple the number that actually did in 2025.

WPP fell out of the FTSE 100 for the first time in three decades and is folding Ogilvy, VML, and AKQA into a single entity c…