Dive Brief:

• Interpublic Group (IPG) has launched a new artificial intelligence-powered unit designed to help brands manage and understand how their products are faring in the increasingly complex commerce ecosystem, per a news release.
• The new Agentic Systems for Commerce (ASC) uses data to generate insights about products, competitors and consumer behavior, including product searches, digital shelf position, pricing and inventory. ACS is being piloted by more than 20 brands, with results that have shown double-digit sales improvement, according to IPG.
• IPG, which is currently set to be acquired by Omnicom in the second half of this year, reported revenue declines of 6.6% and 7.6% during its second-quarter and first-half results, respectively.

Dive Insight:

Agentic AI has been getting a lot of attention across industries for its potential to understand and contextualize the information coming out of generative AI chat bots. IPG’s launch of Agentic Systems for Commerce (ASC) demonstrates the holding company’s commitment to leveraging automation and AI to develop solutions for its clients and new business opportunities.

The new unit marks a “foundational shift for sales and marketing teams to move from standalone tools to intelligent systems,” enabling brands to be less reactive with more unified strategy and performance across the entire e-commerce system, IPG noted in press details.

At a time when the ad holding group’s revenue is declining, such agentic AI-powered tools could be a value-add amid IPG’s revenue struggles. 

“We believe products like ASC can become a new revenue stream for us. And it's another way in which we can use AI to scale our expertise and expand our business beyond our core capability set of marketing communications and media into solutions sets that deliver quantifiable results,” said IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky in a release.

Krakowsky also recently indicated that AI is an area where there are potential synergies to be realized should the proposed merger with Omnicom go through later this year as scheduled. 

“As we expected, we're finding that our respective capabilities in areas such as platforms, data, commerce and AI development are highly complementary,” Krakowsky said during the company’s recent earnings call. “And this gives us a high degree of confidence that the combined assets will be extremely powerful and differentiated in the marketplace. As [Omnicom CEO John Wren] and I have also noted previously, the capacity that the new Omnicom will have to continue to invest and build out on its leadership position in the tech and AI space will be considerable and will further differentiate these offerings over time.”

ASC will be led by Dr. Jeriad Zoghby, IPG’s chief commerce strategy officer, who joined the company from Accenture in 2023. The initiative was backed by IPG’s Global Head of AI commerce Yaniv Sarig, who was part of the company’s acquisition of Intelligence Node for a reported $100 million last December. ASC uses data from Intelligence Node to generate insights across digital commerce channels.