Customer Story Marketing & Communications

55,000 job titles into 600, and 25% capacity back.

How WPP redesigned jobs and roles at scale to power AI transformation — documented independently by The Josh Bersin Company.

Get the full story

9 min read • Independent case study • The Josh Bersin Company

55,000

Job titles mapped

600

Consolidated role

up to 25%

Capacity gains unlocked

100k+

Employees in scope

01 THE CUSTOMER

WPP is one of the world’s largest marketing and communications groups, with more than 100,000 people across agencies and markets. Its people team set out to make work legible at enterprise scale — so AI could be applied deliberately, function by function, rather than opportunistically.

“Add the customer or analyst pull quote here — one sentence, in their words, about what changed.”

Pull quote placeholder · swap per case study

02 THE CHALLENGE

A job architecture nobody could navigate

55,000 job titles had accumulated across acquisitions and markets. Without a shared model of the work itself, there was no way to compare roles, spot duplicated effort, or say which tasks AI could take on — let alone plan against it.

03 THE APPROACH

Work intelligence, inside and out

WPP built a new workforce model from both internal and external data, consolidating titles into 600 roles and decomposing those roles into tasks. Automation-ready tasks were identified and prioritized, giving each function a concrete starting point.

04 THE OUTCOME

A new standard for enterprise AI transformation

The redesign unlocked up to 25% capacity gains and gave WPP a repeatable way to keep the architecture current as AI adoption spreads — all without headcount cuts. The Josh Bersin Company calls the approach a new benchmark for the industry.

Keep reading — the challenge, the approach, and the outcome.

The challenge, the approach, and what trusted work data unlocked.

Unlock the story

Inside the story

What you’ll get

How work intelligence drove productivity, experience and AI adoption across 100,000+ people

The step-by-step strategy behind consolidating job architecture

How automation-ready tasks were identified and prioritized

Lessons any enterprise can apply — without headcount cuts

How it works

One loop, seven stages, no dead ends.

Every engagement runs the same loop. Map the work, analyze it, build against it, run it, measure it, log it, and keep it current as the work moves.

Map

Build the Work Context Graph

Analyze

Your GPS for reinvention

Build

Workflows and agents

Run

Deliver the new way of working

Measure

Track board-ready ROl

Log

Source of truth and audit trail

Update

Keep the architecture current

The loop never stops. As roles, tasks and agents change, the architecture updates itself — which is why the numbers in this story kept holding after go-live.

See the platform

Trusted by the world's most ambitious companies