Human-AI collaboration works when the system around it works, according to WPP. Dr Laura Weis, AI and Transformation Lead at WPP, told aiblLIVE London 2026 that AI is an amplifier: it makes good teams better and bad systems worse.
Her answer is to design the conditions first, then decide what to do with the space AI creates. Here is the model she shared.
All figures as stated on stage by Dr Laura Weis.
Because AI amplifies the system it lands in. Weis says healthy teams with deep expertise, psychologically safe leaders and room to fail see value multiply. AI used to fix something already broken usually fails and scales noise. Organisations also tend to run people and AI strategies in parallel.
At the end of the day, AI by itself doesn’t make you anything. It’s a little bit like saying a spoon will make you fat. Don’t blame the spoon.
Dr Laura Weis, AI and Transformation Lead, WPP
Choose deliberately, because efficiency alone is not a strategy. Weis offers four options: do more with the same people, the same with fewer, do better or do something new. With 47% of WPP respondents seeing client demand shift in a year, automating today’s work risks automating what clients stop buying.
People who connect the yet unconnected. As work moves to flat networks of people and agents, Weis found the people making it work could link silos, disciplines and agents. WPP looks for M-shaped talent with more than one specialism, such as creative technologists who can also code.
Map work as a chain of decisions and test each one on two questions. Is the answer known, and can the decision be undone? Clearing a plane for take-off is known but irreversible, so AI informs while a human decides. Known, reversible decisions can go further towards AI.
AI gives us speed. But much more importantly, it gives us space. Have you defined what you’re going to do with that space that AI creates?
Dr Laura Weis, AI and Transformation Lead, WPP
Dr Laura Weis is AI and Transformation Lead at WPP, working in its technology function to bring people and AI strategy together, after a career in academia and consulting. She spoke on the Workforce track at aiblLIVE London on 20 October 2026.
If AI adoption is up but value is not, this explains why. The full PDF goes deeper than this page, in the speaker’s own words.
For chief people officers, CTOs, transformation leads and organisational design teams. Five pages, about a seven-minute read.
