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Agencies look to AI agents for edge, but must fend off brands looking to in-house with the same tech. With half the industry's dealmakers and powerbrokers gathered in the south of France this week, agencies have been falling over themselves to boast AI agent-related tests, case studies and partnerships. They're not just competing with each other, but rather against the chance clients will use the same technology to bring more of their marketing operations in-house - and off the market. WPP revealed it was testing a media buying and planning agent for premium video inventory just last week. Meanwhile Dentsu has struck a partnership with AI agent development company Newton Research, bolstering the AI analytics and media planning capabilities it offers through Dentsu.connect. The partnership includes the testing of media-buying agents in the U.S., according to Caitlin Gelles, evp of data technology and measurement at Dentsu, as well as solutions to provide faster media analytics and campaign set-up. "We're working on a couple of early-stage pilots [with clients] who want to use Newton for transactional buying," she told Digiday. Gelles said the primary goal of the partnership was to use agents to save time. "It takes hours to set up campaigns across systems... when you can store those nuances in a RAG database, or take how clients like to buy, and let AI find those efficiencies, that's where the value comes in," she said. Related Insights The agentic focus is just as sharp among indies. Butler/Till, which was among the first agencies to begin using AI agents to execute media buys earlier this year, has been working with DoubleVerify to develop Claude agents designed to analyze media inventory quality, and to make automatic adjustments to campaigns to steer them away from poor quality ad space. It's not limited to media planning or buying applications, either. Dept, for example, launched a consultancy service dubbed Agent Studio, which allows clients to effectively rent the engineering workflows and architecture, as well as the underlying tech, that Dept uses to build its own AI agents across a range of applications. "It's about consistency at scale," said Jonathan Whiteside, evp of technology at Dept. At the same time as agencies rush to boast about each new development, clients are also turning to agentic systems. Hyundai, for example, has been working with AI firm Chalice and its in-house media agency Canvas (which also works with other brands, including Zillow) to develop custom AI models and bidding agents using a "containerized" AI solution, OpenXBuild. When used to find inventory on OpenX's SSP, the system led to a 67% reduction in online video CPM rates. Tylynn Pettrey, svp of analytics and AI at Chalice, said the CPM reduction was due to the agent finding inventory that would have otherwise been overlooked. The cost per "high value action," defined by Hyundai as a dealership visit or similar interaction, fell 20% during a pilot scheme. "We eliminated some not-great inventory that we might have purchased; we're focusing our investment on where it matters the most, and scaling it quicker," said Sean Gilpin, North America CMO of Hyundai. He said the company reinvested the savings back into its media budget. The initial tests of the bidding agents ran on campaigns intended to encourage car buyers researching their next vehicle closer to purchasing a Hyundai; Gilpin said future uses of the solution could be tweaked for different objectives. "We want this practice to be deployed on as much of the inventory that we're evaluating. To have this agent on my behalf, doing evaluation of every impression... that becomes a competitive advantage," he said. Although more advertisers are investing in their own programmatic media planning and buying chops, few can boast the depth of Hyundai's internal marketing capabilities. AI investments could be one way of closing the gap, though. According to the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), 71% of in-house teams are implementing AI in their marketing operations while 93% expect to invest further in AI tech over the next 12-24 months. Related Insights Dept's productized approach to agent implementation may provide one way forward for agencies. It's designed to provide a speed and rigor to bespoke AI builds that an internal team might struggle to match. Dept's team implemented an e-commerce platform redesign using AI agents built with Google's Gemini and Antigravity suites for Blackroll, a Swiss fitness equipment brand. Whiteside said the redesign was completed 3.8 times quicker than Dept estimated would have been possible without AI agents. Scott Zalaznik, CEO at Blackroll, said the company was now using AI agents for the majority of its e-commerce feature testing and development. The Dutch agency group's strategy extends to developing an AI assistant designed to finesse project management and digital workflows. Taken together with Agent Studio, the focus on efficiency and orchestration forms part of the company's response to clients potentially taking their business in-house. As AI lowers the barriers to running a media planning and buying team, or to clients managing their own digital transformation projects, agencies need to show that their partnerships, their tech and their working models can get more out of those same tools than clients can without their assistance.