Embracing AI: How Unilever and Agency Leaders Have Encouraged Teams To Upskill

There is a cold, hard truth about the future of the ad industry - if not the entire world of business and entertainment – that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) will factor in every professional’s work somehow. It’s still early days, but facts need to be faced by those who want to maintain their careers in the long term.

Each agency network has announced plans to spend hundreds of millions of pounds annually to strengthen their AI capabilities, including developing their own AI operating systems, such as Publicis Groupe’s Marcel, WPP's Open or Omnicom’s Omni, while forging major partnerships with tech organisations such as Nvidia, Adobe, Microsoft etc.

Most recently, in March, WPP announced its latest strategic partnership and investment - this time in Stability AI, a pioneer in generative AI and the developer of Stable Diffusion..

The AI genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

However, there is understandable nervousness and reticence among industry talent who are wary that by working with it, they are feeding the beast and training AI to make themselves obsolete.

It would be naïve not to have those thoughts, but still marketers and agencies now expect it to be a part of the day job due to the benefits it ultimately offers in terms of a quicker speed and potential cost saving.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is senior executives that are adopting AI over younger professionals, a statistic backed up earlier this year by AI startup Lightricks and the American Marketing Association (AMA).

According to PwC’s Workforce Radar, 41 per cent of executives found workforce issues, such as training, culture, or change in work, to be among the top-five challenges in using GenAI.

It also revealed that executives found building out foundation technologies, training on new tech, and achieving measurable value from its investment, to be challenges to helping workers develop the new skills needed to meet organisational performance expectations.

Marketers introducing AI

If marketers are embracing it, then there’s no choice but for their agency partners to become experts and embrace it too, especially when some of the world’s biggest brands are innovating and investing in AI themselves.

Despite that, a skills gap apparently remains, claims the previously mentioned research from the AMA, with 65 per cent of executives receiving formal AI training as opposed to 34 per cent of entry-level marketers, potentially creating long-term disparities in AI skill sets across job levels.

At LEAD 2025, Simon Valcarcel, Virgin Media O2's (VMO2) marketing director, spoke with marketers from Mondelez, Reckitt and Royal London about their adoption experiences.

Valcarcel said that more needs to be done to remove the stigma behind using AI in the workplace. “That is such a poor way to innovate,” he says when discussing the culture of hiding its use. “At VMO2 what we do is create a really safe culture that really encourages the use of AI. In the marketing team, we have an AI lab that is designed to foster some of the experiments, whether it is in day-to-day use from a range of people that put different experiences.”

In March, Unilever announced that it intended to reinvent is product shoots utilising AI-driven technologies to meet a growing demand for content. It is working with Nvidia Omniverse to deliver consistent, creative and high-quality product images that will serve its brand experiences and believes this will see product imagery created twice as fast and reduce costs by 87 per cent.

Esi Eggleston Bracey, chief growth and marketing officer at Unilever, says that the company is not just experimenting with the technology, it is accelerating its use across the entire business to reduce complexity and increase demand for its brands.

Through the development of its ‘AI Playground’, she believes that it will “fundamentally transform” the way that Unilever works, creates and innovates while allowing teams to experiment, learn and sometimes fail. The business current has more than 400 AI Change Champions evangelising and demoing the technology to their peers to increase confidence.

“About people being quiet about using AI – here's what I believe: It's our job as leaders to create an environment where everyone feels confident to experiment, to ask questions, and to share their experiences – both 'wins' and 'learning' moments. That's why we're so intentional about our training programs,” explains Eggleston Bracey.

She describes the outcome of this adoption strategy as “game-changing” and reveals that creative briefs have been cracked on average, 21 per cent faster with design teams gaining back eight full days a month through the support of AI.

“With over 500 AI applications across our business, we're not just working faster – we're working smarter. We're predicting trends before they emerge, creating content that truly resonates, and getting innovations to market at unprecedented speed. In marketing, we've moved from pilots to choice scaling while always experimenting, given the speed of change. But what really makes me proud is seeing people's confidence grow as they master these new tools. We're giving marketers the space to do what they do best - think bigger, be creative, push boundaries and create magic for our brands,” she continues.

“After a decade of working with AI, I can tell you we're just scratching the surface. The real power isn't in the technology itself – it's in how we use it to embed our brands in culture and earn the purchase,” Eggleston Bracey concludes.

Agency execs on AI encouragement

With agencies spending hundreds of millions of dollars to introduce and implement the technology at speed, getting it right has been crucial while ensuring all teams are willing and ready to work using AI, whatever their role.

But there has been reticence across the business community. Slack’s 2024 Workforce Index, which surveyed over 17,000 workers globally, found that just under half (48 per cent) of workers were uncomfortable admitting to using AI platforms to their manager for fear of being seen as less competent or lazy.

WPP has increased its annual investment to £300m in AI and technology through WPP Open, which now acts as the focal point for the entire business to service clients within this new era of innovation.

That platform connects its teams and offers administrative and creative functions that have changed how they work with clients and produce work. To ensure the AI platform works as required, it was developed in-house as it was important for staff to adopt it without feeling daunted by it too.

“We have been thinking about this and building this for a long time,” explains Pip Hulbert, CEO of VML UK, part of the WPP group. “The starting point has to be defining a clear strategy and vision, and our starting point was to articulate that into something that felt simple and understandable because it has to be relevant to everybody.

"It needs to be relevant to creatives. It needs to be relevant to strategists. It needs to be relevant to the finance department. Everybody needs to understand and feel comfortable with that. And then there is a road map of how we need to get that adopted and used every day.”

The platform was launched with an unveiling event at The Truman Brewery for VML staff in May 2024, where they heard from Neil Stewart, CEO of WPP Open, about the vision and direction for it.

From there, Hulbert explains, it was up to senior members of the team to continually talk about the platform while beginning to build it into KPIs and work streams while developing the necessary skills to use it.

AMV BBDO has hosted demonstrations from partner companies developing Gen AI tools to support creative development, such as Firefly and Adobe, to allow the agency to introduce their technology to its teams. And while the technology is doing much of the work, Nadja Lossgott, co-CCO of the agency sees the creative mind remaining as the core driver.

"It is this amazing democratisation of image generation and creativity, but unless you add a vision on top of that, people and creatives are flying with it, because it is much quicker in enabling you to create what's in your head and allows you to reach further and higher at speed. So, in one way, you also don't have to encourage it [with creatives], because it's pretty obvious how easy it makes life for designers and art directors and, creatives to put what's in their heads on screen," explains Lossgott.

Edelman UK’s chief AI officer Gavin Spicer says that while a core business pillar is bringing curiosity into its work, it has been supporting and encouraging teams to explore, experiment and test AI tools to enhance their work.

“An important aspect is making AI accessible to everybody in the business, ensuring that opportunities to learn are ongoing, and that we are sharing best practice and spotlighting the innovation happening across teams. Sharing examples regularly to inspire our teams on their own journeys,” he continues.

Within Gravity Road, which is part of The Brand Tech Group, there is little persuasion needed to embrace new tech says co-founder Mark Eaves, as the culture of creative experimentation to figure out how to do new things with technology runs deep.

“Let's do some exceptional things in exceptional ways,” is the mantra Eaves states, emphasising the adoption of Gen AI to develop and craft marketing communications work. The agency has already tapped AI tools to support work on developing major campaigns for brands such as Hotel Chocolat, the IOC, and McCain Foods.

He says: “You need a curiosity and playfulness in the culture, you take playfulness quite seriously and you need to keep a certain shape of business and a certain kind of mentality to do it so that you can move and adapt and be able to capitalise on those things.”

Eaves continues: “A lot of it is down to trying to keep the business looking outwards rather than looking inwards because all this stuff is through interesting partners that you might meet and creators themselves. Often, creative businesses look inwards. They believe the answer comes from within, and in this world it doesn't. The inspiration might come within, but the answers will come from outside the company. So, there's a mindset shift there.”

Meanwhile, IPG-owned creative agency FCB London has given all staff access to AI tools to encourage day-to-day use to lighten the mental load and help them to do more.

The agency’s director of growth and innovation, Mike Jenkins warns that while it has been open to investing and adopting in new AI tools and people requesting access to various new platforms to experiment, it is important to be cognisant of using them responsibly and to be careful when agreeing to terms and conditions.

The FCB Network also has a global AI Council which provides regular guidance and strategic direction to AI implementation that fosters continuous learning through cross-network team channels dedicated to informal, ongoing knowledge exchange.

“Being open about using AI creates a collective learning culture, allowing our teams to continuously discover innovative solutions – and sometimes new challenges,” says Jenkins. “By openly sharing insights and experiences, we've reinforced that AI isn't a silver bullet for any single problem but rather a dynamic toolset enhancing our creative processes. This openness consistently reveals exciting opportunities for integrating AI effectively into our workflows.”

Meanwhile, over at sister IPG network Weber Shandwick, its head of digital communications James Robertson talks about The Sandbox, its own internal AI platform that empowers teams with secure experimentation. The agency also uses IPG-wide platform AI Interact, to develop and test AI-driven concepts.  

“We know it's not a case of 'build it and they will come',” admits Robertson. “We've deployed EMEA-wide live and real-time training sessions to encourage the use of those platforms and other trusted AI tools. But, instead of trying to create a one-size-fits-all training, we've tailored sessions specifically for individual teams and specialisms. This is backed up by user guides, prompt libraries and operating frameworks to ensure that all learnings are shared and as much consistency is maintained as possible.”

And the business is now reaping the rewards, finding that its people are not fearful of the technology, enhancing their abilities to research and refine messaging, validating its strategies, catalysing creativity and mitigating risk.

VCCP decided to move quickly with the introduction of its own AI creative practice named Faith. The division was created to act as its focal point around the technology, providing internal teams with the tools that they need, provide general and specific training by in-house resource and software providers, give inspiration and information about the latest capabilities and features through talks from our innovation team, and constantly share the results of experiments and the process behind our campaigns that have AI at the core.

"Because we’ve been so open about the potential benefits of generative AI and ensured people have access to tools and training, we don’t have a culture where the use of AI is seen as ‘cheating’," outlines Peter Gasston, innovation lead at VCCP.

It seems when it comes to working with AI, most in the advertising world will struggle to resist and by talking openly and showcasing its potential, executives can integrate it quickly within a business. But the tone among industry leaders is one of universal positivity at what it can achieve for clients and industry professionals. As the old saying goes: 'If you can't beat 'em...'.