Sir Martin Sorrell has seen the fax machine come and go. He watched the internet rewire global commerce. Now the founder of WPP — the longest-serving CEO in FTSE 100 history at 33 years — says artificial intelligence is the most consequential shift yet, and the executives who misread it will pay a steep price.
'AI flattens the organization,' Sorrell told Fortune. 'In a multi-branded, multi-vertical, multi-siloed company, people develop power bases by controlling information. If information is available to everybody, if you give them access, it changes the dynamics. Good people who share will be the real kings and queens.'
The observation cuts against a deeply embedded corporate habit. Academics Catherine Connelly and David Zweig have labeled it 'knowledge hiding' — the deliberate withholding of information as a career weapon. In the pre-AI office, that behavior could be rewarded. Sorrell's argument is that the model is now broken by design.
The efficiency reckoning for advertising
Sorrell's current vehicle, S4 Capital, sits inside an industry he describes as 'still surprisingly manual in execution.' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put a number on the exposure in 2024, suggesting 95% of marketing roles — including content and campaign creation — could be replaced by AI. Sorrell does not accept that figure, but he does not dismiss the direction.
'I don't think 95% will go, but some will go,' he said. 'That's pretty tough, because your interest as an agency was to prolong [projects] for as long as possible, and to make the campaign in the most expensive location possible. You don't have to do that anymore. Essentially making ads is cheaper, and we have to change the model to be cheaper and more efficient.'
His benchmark is Wall Street. 'Do you think that Larry Fink does, or his people do, manual spreadsheets?' Sorrell asked. 'No, it's all automated. If you think about machine trading on Wall Street, it's a very high proportion. In our business we have 250,000 people, mainly 25-year-old media planners and buyers, and they're doing their work semi-manually, often wholly manually. That can't work — in a hyperscaler-driven world it is going to be done algorithmically.'
He points to the automotive sector as proof the market has already moved. AI-generated content is now widely accepted in car advertising, a segment Sorrell calls 'as picky as it gets.'
Public anxiety is real; the opportunity is larger
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published in June found that half of American adults fear AI could put them or someone in their household out of work, with college graduates registering the highest concern. Sorrell does not wave that anxiety away, but he frames it against a longer arc.
He recalled a conversation from the early 2000s with the principal of a Mexican technology university enrolling roughly 30,000 students. 'They didn't have libraries, but today they have access to the internet, and the marginal cost of information is zero,' Sorrell said. 'If you think about AI, which is like the internet on steroids, the marginal cost of information — not just in a company, but inside government, inside universities, to kids — is zero and we can do things with these tools that we never could do before.'
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Sorrell's framework is, at its core, a free-enterprise argument: the firms that lower their cost structure fastest and deploy capital most efficiently will win. Agencies that built revenue models around billable hours and expensive production locations were, in effect, taxing their own clients. AI removes that tax. The market will reward the adjustment and penalize the delay.
The deeper point is about organizational structure. Bureaucracies — corporate or governmental — survive by controlling information flows. When the marginal cost of information falls to zero, that survival strategy collapses. What replaces it is exactly what Sorrell describes: leaner hierarchies, distributed talent and a premium on people willing to collaborate rather than hoard. Capital rewards clear rules, and the clearest rule AI is writing right now is this — share or be left behind.
