By Nathan Jolly
Publication Date: 2026-03-03 03:13:00
Globally, office work has become the next cost base driving wild market swings, with Wall Street acting like “a mob with bats” indiscriminately searching for the next industry to be affected by AI automation.
This is a familiar theme currently being felt across the communications sector, particularly among holding companies where consolidation is both a cost and a capability issue. The Omnicom-IPG merger, for example, focused on an estimated $750 million in annual cost savings related to severance and “structural cost savings” that will be reinvested in data and AI.
On the surface, it’s about productivity: AI takes over talent production, research and reporting so networks run leaner. However, take a look underneath and something more interesting happens. As generative models flood the world with cheap content (aka “AI slop”), brand leaders are rediscovering that what still stands out isn’t volume, but the human ability to craft a story that…
