Michelle Holland.
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Michelle Holland, Managing Director, Ogilvy Sydney & Brisbane.
If 2024 was the year the advertising industry collectively marvelled at the ‘wow’ of generative AI, then 2025 was the year we got serious. Every day brings a new tool, a new platform, a new proclamation that our world is about to be unrecognisably transformed. While the potential is undeniable, I believe the more pressing and strategic conversation isn’t about the technology itself, but about how we engineer it into our organisations to create tangible value for our clients and our people.
The challenge is immense. It requires more than just adopting off-the-shelf tools; it demands a foundational shift in our operating model. Those that are really making headway are also undertaking significant, foundational investments in building proprietary AI-powered platforms. These provide the essential infrastructure, the access to robust data, and the suite of tools necessary to compete and lead in this new landscape. From our own experience, this is the answer to the sheer scale of the technological challenge.
But while platforms provide foundation, true potential is only unlocked through its application. In short, translating a platform's capabilities into specific, effective solutions for clients of all sizes.
This philosophy is built on the belief that the ‘how’ is infinitely more important than the ‘wow’. It’s about leveraging the collective power of proprietary platforms where data, technology, converge and combining that with the talent of our teams. This past year, our energy has been channelled into building this internal ecosystem, connecting our disparate tools and data sources to create a single source of truth that empowers our people. It’s less about the magic trick and more about the thoughtful engineering that makes the magic happen, consistently and at scale. By focusing on our own platforms, we’re not just using AI; we’re shaping it to our specific needs and those of our clients.
As we look to the year ahead, our focus is shifting from intelligent tools to what I believe is the next great frontier: agentic teammates.
This isn't a story about replacement; it's a story about partnership. The future I see is one where AI evolves into expert agents that work alongside our teams—specialist partners that augment our capabilities and amplify our creativity. Imagine a strategist briefing an AI agent that can instantly synthesise market data, competitor analysis, and cultural trends, providing a foundational landscape in minutes, not days. Imagine a creative team, no longer staring at a blank page, but collaborating with an AI partner that can generate hundreds of visual territories or copy variations based on a core idea, freeing them to focus on conceptual thinking and craft.
This is the end of the ‘blank page’ as we know it. It’s about eliminating the friction and the grunt work, allowing our best people to do what they do best: think, create, and solve complex problems. This vision is central to our ambition of building the agency of the future, bringing the best of our thinking to our clients with unprecedented speed and precision.
Any business or agency looking to differentiate itself in this new landscape won’t come from having access to the same off-the-shelf models as everyone else. It will come from the unique power of our own systems, our owns ecosystems and, most importantly, from our people.
Ultimately, this is all about reaching of one goal: delivering smarter, more effective work, faster and of course at lower cost for our clients. By engineering real intelligence into an organisation, agencies are not just keeping pace with change; we’re building a durable competitive advantage that will define our creative product and client partnerships for years to come. The hype is over. The real work has begun.
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