Tom Kirkham.
The AdNews end-of-year Perspectives, looking back at 2025 and forward to next year.
Tom Kirkham, WPP Media, General Manager: Partnerships, Data & Platforms.
As the story goes, “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle”. So, when it comes to AI, we need to choose our three wishes wisely.
The release of generative AI is a generally considered a watershed moment for humanity. It was the moment that university level intellect was placed in the hands of anyone with an internet connection. The super intelligent genie was released from the bottle. And as the story goes, every genie released from its cage grants three wishes, now it’s on us to choose our three wishes wisely.
We all know how this goes. Carelessly worded wishes end with dramatically unforeseen consequences. A badly worded wish to fly, could result in being turned into a common house fly, not the freedom to soar high in the sky. Still on brief… but with dramatic and unseen consequences.
My sense is that we’ve asked one wish already, and we’re formulating the second. And the third – for me anyway – is hopeful.
With our first wish, we asked for smarter AI. That desire was granted with ever increasing increments in capability led by a groundswell of investment in Silicon Valley and across the world. The likes of Open AI believe we’ve already hit the next milestone of artificial general intelligence, defined as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work”. It’s largely agreed that some level of superintelligence that is many orders of magnitude, and into the thousands, will be here by 2027.
The second wish, crucially, is still being formed. It goes something like this: “put the right governance in place to control what we do with AI, before we lose control”.
This essence of this wish is the right one. With great power, comes great responsibility after all. However, I fear that the wrong wording will have a deep unforeseen consequence.
Just this month, the Australian government revealed it is shifting away from standalone legislation like an AI Act and is instead taking a proactive step towards crafting a tailored, forward-looking ‘Australian approach’ to regulating artificial intelligence, according to the innovation minister. What that looks like remains to be seen.
Placing the wrong restrictions will result in fear, a likely centralisation of power, and a total lack of innovation in fields are greatly benefitting from AI, such as health and science, and closer to home media and advertising. I believe that the best way to word this question is to advocate for ‘responsible accessibility’ where we provide safe, secure access for independent innovation and exploration, with very clear guide rails.
When it comes to our industry, this means enabling people to truly unlock the power of AI and not lock it away or restrict the access. While some organisations are just starting out on this journey and remain fearful of what happens when they put AI into the hands of their people, Others are making bigger bets and taking bolder steps. For example, through WPP Open, our AI-powered marketing platform, we have full, unfettered access to any AI model across chat, image, video and more. It connects our people and clients with data, tools and AI in a single, privacy-safe and secure, place and enables us to build customised agents that will do anything from interrogate a brief, produce campaign mock-ups, to doing your time sheets (I mean come on… that’s the holy grail right there).
We call this “AI-enabled human ingenuity”, where we aim to raise the floor of what’s possible, unlocking limitless potential for our people and limitless growth for our clients.
The reality is AI can keep people engaged in the future of our industry, remove the drudgery and spark inspiration. Responsible accessibility, not restriction, is how we keep the magic in human hands.
As every story with a genie goes, there’s always one wish left. It’s the one that defines the ending.
Our third wish must be for AI to rebalance our relationship with technology.
We’ve built a world defined by complexity, acceleration, and rising expectations. The problem is that while we created the technology that fuels this demand, and often amplifies it, we never developed the social capacity to keep up. Our tools advanced, but our ability to process the world they created did not.
This advert for Excel in 1992 for example… I don’t think anyone would walk into a boardroom with this spreadsheet in 2025!
The fear has always been that technology will replace us or erode human connection. But the reality is more optimistic. AI gives us the chance to finally meet the demands of modern life. It can unlock our productivity, expand our knowledge, enhance our experience, relieve us for the mundane and strengthen our ability to solve problems.
Our third wish must ask that AI rebalances our relationship with technology. We have created a world of complexity, with a need for speed, and delivering better results. The issue is, our tech got better, but our ability to process it did not.
AI will become the definitive tool that allows us to create limitless possibilities.
So, the genie is out of the bottle… what will you wish for?
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