Are Holding Companies Restructuring Around AI, Or Just Adding It On?
Every major holding company has announced an AI strategy, a proprietary platform, an internal tool, a partnership with a major AI lab. Far fewer have actually changed the underlying structure of how their agencies are organised and staffed. Those are two different things, and the gap between them is where the real story is.
The easy, visible move for a holding company is to build or license a shared AI platform and roll it out across its network of agencies, layering new capability on top of an organisational structure, discipline-siloed agencies competing for the same client budgets, that predates AI entirely. That is a genuine investment and a real capability upgrade. It is not the same as restructuring around what AI actually makes possible, which would mean rethinking how those siloed agencies relate to each other in the first place.
What genuine restructuring would actually look like
If AI collapses some of the production-heavy distinctions between disciplines, a media agency, a creative agency and a production house all becoming more capable of doing pieces of each other's traditional work, the logical structural response is fewer, more integrated units rather than the same siloed agencies with better tools. A handful of holding companies have started down this path, merging previously separate agency brands or building genuinely cross-discipline teams. Most have not, in part because dismantling a structure built around distinct P&Ls, leadership teams and client relationships is organisationally much harder than licensing a new tool.
Why the incentives point toward the easier path
Holding company leadership is generally rewarded on near-term financial performance, and restructuring a network of agencies is disruptive, slow and risks client relationships in the short term, while announcing an AI platform is fast, visible to investors, and doesn't require unwinding any existing structure. That incentive gap explains why the industry's public AI narrative, tools and platforms everywhere, is running well ahead of its structural reality, largely unchanged agency organisation underneath.
Buying the tool is the easy decision. Rebuilding the structure the tool actually makes possible is the one most holding companies are still avoiding.
What to watch for as a genuine signal
The clearer indicator of real structural change isn't a new AI platform announcement, it's whether a holding company is willing to merge agency brands, flatten discipline silos, or change how client teams are staffed across what used to be separate P&Ls. That is a much harder, much less frequent move, and it's the one that actually tells you whether a network is restructuring around AI or simply decorating its existing structure with it.
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