The Agentic Agency
Three decades from media law to WPP's technology chair, Stephan Pretorius argues AI is changing not just how agencies work but what they sell.
"the sort of negativity about AI slop is a, is sort of a slightly boring meme."
Stephan Pretorius is chief technology officer of WPP, where he sets technology strategy for one of the world's largest communications groups, with a heavy focus on AI, data infrastructure and platform integration. He is known for building WPP Open, the group's agentic marketing platform, and for arguing that AI reshapes not only how agencies deliver work but the nature of the work itself.
Pretorius trained as a lawyer, studying media and telecoms law at Columbia in the mid-1990s just as the internet was being commercialised, and used it as his exit from law into digital media. He launched, by his account, the first ad network in South Africa, his home country, before founding Acceleration, an ad tech and martech business he sold to WPP some 12 years later. At WPP he ran Acceleration, helped then-CEO Mark Read turn around Wunderman, and in 2018 became chief technology officer, a remit stretching from systems integration to the whole of marketing services.
Since then Pretorius has built WPP Open and driven the group's agentic adoption, launching a no-code agent builder that, he says, produced thirty thousand agents within a month. He has invested in young AI-native talent through the Hex creative technology apprenticeship, aiming for a thousand apprentices by the end of 2028, and has overseen AI training across the workforce since 2019. He describes the last three years as the most exciting of his career.
"you need to drive distributed innovation in an organization"
"more and more clients are looking to own the core intelligence"
Pretorius sees a lasting change in the client relationship, where brands want to own the data and insights that drive their marketing and their spending decisions. He positions WPP on the side of data collaboration and distributed intelligence, against players who would act as gatekeepers. For him this divergence is healthy, because it gives clients real commercial and philosophical optionality.
"What's exciting is when you can start using AI to do things that you either couldn't do before"
Pretorius separates AI's boring efficiency story from its real prize. He points to super agents that compress two weeks of strategy into five minutes and AI film that replaces feature-film budgets. The value, in his telling, is not cutting cost but doing work that was previously impossible for reasons of time or money.
"That kind of bottom-up energy is what's driven the transformation more than anything."
Pretorius rejects central command as the way to scale technology in a company. Instead he empowers people with general purpose tools, sets guardrails, and lets them build, pointing to thirty thousand agents created within a month of launching a no-code builder. The best super-agent ideas, he says, came from the community solving its own problems.
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