Author: Kimeko McCoy

The makeup of an agency’s AI bill is getting more complicated. Agency execs say AI costs are growing and metered model usage is becoming a trend, forcing execs to take a closer look at AI expenses and who foots the bill. 

If an exec were to get a regular bill for third-party AI tool costs, here’s what would be on it: subscriptions for the tools—like Claude, ChatGPT and Google’s suite of AI-powered offerings, tokens to use said tools and employee costs to pay staff who are using the tools.

For the most part, agencies are carving out a piece of their existing tech budgets to fuel AI spend rather than creating a new line item on the P&L. According to research from Ramp, about 31% of companies spend more than $10,000 per month on AI, indicating AI is a formal budget line. All three of the agency execs Digiday spoke with declined to outline specific AI spend figures. 

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WPP is set to win Coca-Cola’s global media, data and tech business. For CEO Cindy Rose, the timing couldn’t be better. A year into trying to fix the holdco, a win of this size, from a brand with Coke’s stature, is the kind of thing a CEO points to as proof the turnaround is real.

But the win comes with an asterisk. Publicis was the only other agency group in the running and it dropped out before the process finished. Nobody found out whether WPP could have beaten it straight up. Instead, the field just narrowed to one name, and that name happened to be WPP’s.

Some might call that winning on a technicality. But that reading discounts how close the head-to-head between WPP and Publicis actually was before the latter walked away. One source, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity because they work with the team that was competing for the account, described it as close. 

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