WPP asks what the team will do with the space AI creates

A faster draft can still leave the choice where it was. The person who has to pick among versions has no better reason than yesterday. The hour that was saved has nowhere to go, so it fills with more of the same work.

Dr Laura Weis's account is from the Workforce track at aiblLIVE London on 20 October 2026. She is AI and Transformation Lead at WPP, in its technology function, after a career in academia and consulting. Her claim is that the tool is an amplifier. Healthy teams, with deep expertise, psychologically safe leaders and room to fail, see value multiply. A tool used to repair something already broken usually fails, and then it scales the noise. She refuses the blame that usually follows. "At the end of the day, AI by itself doesn't make you anything. It's a little bit like saying a spoon will make you fat. Don't blame the spoon."

The page is specific about the split she keeps seeing. Organisations run a people strategy and a tool strategy side by side, and together they deliver little. The work of designing them as one system is the condition she puts first. She also offers a question for the hour the tool gives back, and she will not let efficiency stand in for an answer. "AI gives us speed. But much more importantly, it gives us space. Have you defined what you're going to do with that space that AI creates?"

The four uses she names are a choice, not a menu the tool makes. Do more with the same people. Do the same with fewer. Do better. Do something new. Internal research at WPP, as she stated it on stage, found that 47 percent of respondents had seen work and client demand shift in a fundamental way over the past year, and that 82 percent expect another fundamental shift in the next one to two years. Automating today's work, on that reading, can automate a thing clients are about to stop buying. The page does not name the clients or the work that moved. The percentages are the finding it prints.

Who does well, in her account, can connect what is not yet connected, across silos, disciplines and agents. WPP looks for M-shaped people, more than one specialism in the same person, and a creative technologist who can also code is the example. The page does not count them.

The decision test is two questions. Is the answer known? Can it be undone? Clearing a plane for take-off is her example of known and irreversible, so the tool informs and a person decides. A known decision that can be undone can sit further towards the tool. Systems, not stated goals, are what she says shape behaviour, so the behaviour you want has to be the one that is rewarded. In her own papers, agents moved the reference pile from 15 or 20 to between 200 and 300. The page does not say the papers got better.

1. Design the people system and the tool system as one. Side by side, she says, delivers little. An amplifier on a team with no room to fail scales the noise.

2. Name what the space is for before the saving is celebrated. More with the same people, the same with fewer, better or new. With 47 percent already seeing demand shift, automating today's job can keep work a client is leaving.

3. Ask whether the answer is known and whether it can be undone before a decision moves. Known and irreversible stays with a person. Known and reversible can go further. The page does not add a third category.

4. Do not read a thicker pile of references as a better decision. Fifteen or twenty, against a pile between 200 and 300, is what changed in her papers. The page does not grade them. Reward the behaviour, because a stated goal will not do it.

A critical thinking session is a practical place to take one decision a team already makes, ask whether the answer is known and whether it can be undone, and write down what the freed hour is for before anyone treats speed as the result.