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.
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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.
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.
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.