“Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared,” Bill Gates saidin1999,the year OpenAI CEO Sam Altman turned 14. “A company’s values and reward system should reflect that idea.”ProudMBA holders the world overare well aware of thepredilection forthe opposite—what the academicsCatherine Connelly and David Zweig christened“knowledge hiding.”In a business, what you knowthatothersdon’tcanstill conferadvantages,and hoarding information can be seen as a skill.Will such behaviorssurvivecontact with the AI era?
Not according to Sir Martin Sorrell,the founder of the digital media agencyS4Capital. Before that, as founder of the media giant WPP, hebecamethe longest serving CEOof aFTSE 100company, clocking in at a total of 33 years.Being in the ninth decade of life, Sorrell, 81, confers acertain calmness andlong-termview when it comes to technological change and its effects on business.Sorrell remembers a time when faxes seemed pretty neat.
“I think the most fascinatingarea[in the development of AI]is what I call democratization of knowledge,” Sorrelltells me. “AI flattens the organization. In a multi-branded, multi-vertical, multi-siloedcompany, people develop power bases by controlling information. If information is available to everybody, if you give them access, it changes the dynamics. Good people who share will be the real kings and queens.”
Evenkings andqueens need jobs.In 2024,Altmansuggested that 95% ofrolesin marketing, including content and campaigncreation, could be replaced by AI.The revolution will not be that destructive, Sorrellsays, but huge efficiency gains are coming.
“I don’t think 95% will go, but some will go,” he saysof an industry that is still surprisingly manualin execution. “That’spretty tough, because your interest as an agency was to prolong[projects] foras long as possible, and to makethe campaignin the most expensive location possible. Youdon’thave to do that anymore. Essentially making ads is cheaper, and wehave tochange the modelto be cheaper and more efficient.”
“If information is available to everybody, if you give them access, it changes the dynamics. Good people who share will be the real kings and queens.”
Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of the digital media agency,S4Capital
Sorrellcomparesthe advertising industry with the world of asset management, where computerized workflows are the norm, not the exception.
“Do you think that Larry Fink does,orhis people do, manual spreadsheets, or semi-manual or semi-automatic?” Sorrell says. “No,it’sall automated.If you think about machine trading on Wall Street,it’sa very highproportion. In our business we have250,000 people,mainly 25-year-oldmedia planners and buyers,andthey’redoing their work semi-manually, often wholly manually. Thatcan’twork. In ahyperscaler-driven worldit is going to be done algorithmically.”
Sorrell says that in the car industry, for example, AI-generated content is now widely accepted, and thatis in asectorthatis “as picky as it gets.”“You can now do extraordinary things with technology,” he says. “And we’ve got to get used to doing it.”
I ask Sorrell aboutthe increasing evidence thatpublic sentiment is turning against AI over global security, personal datasecurity,and job security. In JuneaReuters/Ipsos pollfound that half ofAmericanadultsfear that the rise of AI could put them or someone in their household out of work.College graduates were more concerned than other groups.
“I think wehave to look at what’s happening in a positive way,”Sorrell said,remembering back inthe early 2000s when he spoke to the principal of one of Mexico’s leading technology universities.Concern is a reasonable response to technological change.
“It was a university of about 30,000 kids, and the principal said to me: ‘It’samazing what the internet has done to Mexicanvillages.’Theydidn’thave libraries, but today they have access to the internet, and the marginal cost of information is zero. And those kids now have access to information sources.”
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“If you think about AI, which is like the internet on steroids, the marginal cost of information—not just in a company, but inside government, inside universities, to kids—is zero, and we can do things with these tools that we never could dobefore.”
The way we work will have to change.Sorrell argues that the COVID pandemicbrought forththe era of “distributed working,”a world in which, if you have a laptop, you can be at work, whether you’re at home or on a beach. The youngest generationshaveentered the workforce at a time when working from anywhere is possible.
“A reporter interviewed somebody who was running a firm with a lot of Gen Z employees, and she said, ‘It’s effingdifficult,’” Sorrell says. “AndI think shewas very brave to say it, becauseit’squitea difficult thingto say, particularly in this environment, but I thinkit’sdead true.
“I thinkit’sto do with a different attitude developed through COVID, developed through distributed working. It is much more difficult to managethatthan it is a workforce of 200,000 who come into offices on a regular basis. And part of the reason for the reaction thatwe’veseen from JPMorgan Chase, WPP—‘You have to come back’—is because the people that run the business are uncomfortable.
“In a business like ours, it does depend to a large degree on interface and interaction. The point about the young people you recruit is how can they understand the culture ifthey’re55 miles away?”
In his 1930s essay,Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, the economist John MaynardKeynes saidthe challenge for the future wouldbe “how tooccupy ourleisure.”Elon Musk makes similar predictions today—that we will soon be in an “age of abundance”as super-productive AI replaces the need to work.
Sorrell, who studied economics at Cambridge,says thatKeynes’s essayis worth revisiting.“My basic thesis nowisthatKeynes was right, but he was 100 years too early.” The AI revolution could finally bringus allthe 15-hour working week.
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