The new renaissance: can businesses build human-centric tech?

WPP global chief technology officer Stephan Pretorius tells The Growth Agenda how businesses can harness the new transformational phase of AI.

Stephan Pretorius is the chief technology Officer at WPP

Forget efficiencies, artificial intelligence has entered a new phase where it is transforming professional services, including marketing, and driving a human-centric future for tech, according to WPP global chief technology officer Stephan Pretorius.

The London-based tech guru, who is responsible for technology strategy across the entire WPP group of communication and advertising agencies, believes the industrialisation of intelligence has begun and we are already experiencing the fundamental transformation of work across industries such as law, consulting, accounting, and marketing and advertising.

“AI is a cultural technology, like writing or printing or telecommunications. It’s a technology that encodes human knowledge and facilitates the dissemination of human knowledge. But, it’s also a technology about intelligence — that’s a phrase that Fei-Fei Li (a computer scientist referred to as the godmother of AI) coined — because it makes the way that we process information, make decisions, combine things, come up with new ideas. It industrialises intelligence.”

Mr Pretorius said this next phase was evident in the conversations he’s had with global clients who were not interested in discussing the “unit economics” of what WPP companies could do, but rather how the technology could transform their business to better connect with consumers.

“At a macro level, our CMO clients are saying to us, we don’t want to spend less on marketing,” he said.

“We want more impact for what we’re spending.

“So at the very worst, it’s more impact for the same budget. But in some cases, it’s more for more.

“Because if you have more impact, and you can drive more sales, and engage customers better, then clients are willing to spend more on marketing.

“We see AI as a growth opportunity, it’s not a structural challenge.

“The process that the industry is going through now is simply an adjustment of figuring out what needs to be automated and done with machines, and (determining) what are we willing to pay for high value human tasks, and how does that balance out for the future.”

This transformative impact on the way the marketing and advertising industry works is one of the key drivers behind the current market trend of a refocus on the basics and fundamentals of marketing.

“What AI has done is made it very apparent how important things like brand strategy, brand articulation, demand space planning and category entry points, and all these really important strategic marketing concepts are in terms of improving and differentiating what you do,” Mr Pretorius said.

With the increasing use of AI technology like generative AI and large language models (LLMs) the emphasis shifts to ensuring the right information is used, because the output is only as good as the inputs. “So, having extremely high quality, thoughtful, content that you’ve really invested a lot of time and effort into to drive your AI is going to be absolutely critical for effective AI use, otherwise it’s just commoditised and lacks differentiation from what everyone else can get through public LLMs,” he said.

Beyond marketing and advertising, Mr Pretorius argues the implications of the technology across society are significant particularly for industries such as law, which can use LLMs for document discovery within cases and even adopt AI for small claims to free up the system for the cases that require human time.

He is also pragmatic about the environmental impact of AI, arguing the enormous power required to drive the tech is offset by the enormous energy that goes into existing industry norms, such as the huge costs of large production shoots for TV commercials. More broadly Mr Pretorius advocates for a future where the technology is made widely accessible to ensure that we build a human-centric AI that values creativity, empathy, and collaboration.

“If we can deploy this technology in a democratic way and across organisations and societies, I do believe we have a potential for a new intellectual Renaissance, a kind of new enlightenment.

“It’s hard to keep the humanism in the software and ensure it can think human first.

“But, I am optimistic, and hopeful that we can actually drive a new renaissance with this technology.

“The trick is to create broad access programs and give everyone in the world, effectively, access to these tools so that they can benefit from it equally.

“That is the key to solving societal issues for the next decade.”