Which is the most AI-centric of the major agency holding companies? Based on a "Media3.0" analysis of their annual reports, WPP is far and away the most dominant, followed by Stagwell. All others are also-rans.

Bear in mind, it was a completely quantitative analysis counting up the number of times each of the hold cos mentioned "AI" and/or "artificial intelligence" in their recently published 2023 annual reports. After all, 2023 was the "year of AI" on Madison Avenue, wasn't it?

Based purely on the AI rhetoric published in each of the reports, WPP dominated the pack, with 175 mentions of the technology in its report. That was nearly twice as much as runner-up Stagwell, and the rest of the pack were long-distance also-rans.

For the purposes of this analysis, I excluded Havas, because it is reported as part of a bigger French entertainment and media conglomerate, Vivendi, so it was hard to tease out Havas' "share of AI."

Speaking of difficulty, I thought I could do this analysis utilizing one of the major generative AI platforms, thinking that counting up word mentions in an annual report is just the sort of chimp work AI would be better suited at than me. I was wrong. In fact, I spent significant time logging in and writing prompts for OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Co-Pilot, but basically got the same output from all of them: Count them up manually yourself, and do it the old-fashioned way -- by eye-balling them.

I spent some time analyzing the quants of other key words in the hold co annual reports, which I'll spare you, because they're not exactly relevant to 3.0, but none of them had any reference to next-gen, disruptive media tech like Web3, etc.

And just out of curiosity, and mainly because I'm kind of dystopian about the whole AI thing, I threw in the word "ethics."

The least quantitatively ethical were Interpublic, Omnicom and Stagwell, with one mention each (and they were boilerplate references, at that). Publicis had three, Dentsu had 15, WPP had 25 and Vivendi had a whopping 68.

Yeah, I know I said I excluded Havas/Vivendi from the AI analysis, so you can question my own ethical judgement for including them for this one.