By This Hour Business Desk
Artificial intelligence is being positioned as a way to make advertising faster, cheaper and more prolific. But a disagreement inside the production business has exposed a harder question for Britain’s creative economy: if fewer young directors learn on commercial shoots, where will they acquire the experience that has traditionally carried some of them into film and television?
Luke Scott, who runs the group that includes Ridley Scott Associates, has warned that generative AI could hollow out the practical work through which directors develop. His concern is not simply that software will change how an advert is made. It is that the removal or contraction of real production assignments could leave aspiring directors with fewer chances to make decisions, work with crews and translate an idea into a finished piece of screen work.
WPP Production, meanwhile, presents AI as a productive tool rather than a substitute for creative people. The advertising group has opened a flagship east London facility as the first site in an international expansion of its £600m production business. Its stated aim is to combine creative production with advanced AI capabilities, cutting costs and accelerating output for an expanding range of digital channels.
The two views describe the same commercial pressure from sharply different angles. One sees a possible break in a talent pipeline; the other sees more work, more formats and a workforce adapting to new tools. For agencies, production companies, brands and the people hoping to direct their first substantial projects, the difference matters because it concerns not only the cost of an individual campaign but the conditions under which the next generation gains professional judgment.
Commercials have served as a route into larger screen work
Advertising has long offered a particular kind of training ground. A commercial director must turn a client brief into a short, highly controlled film while managing visual style, timing, performers, crew, locations and practical constraints. The work is commissioned, competitive and exposed to close scrutiny, yet it can allow emerging filmmakers to build a body of work more quickly than longer-form productions permit.
That route has produced recognisable examples. Guy Ritchie began in music videos and commercials before his later film career. Dougal Wilson directed John Lewis Christmas advertising and later directed Paddington in Peru. The significance of those careers is not that every advertising director is expected to move into feature filmmaking. Rather, they illustrate why commercial production has been seen as a place where directorial instincts can be tested under real deadlines and with real budgets.
The concern raised by Scott is that the experience itself, rather than merely the finished advert, is the valuable asset. He has argued that creative work is learned by doing. In that account, a director develops through repeated practical encounters: weighing alternatives, responding to an unforeseen limitation, working with other specialists and accepting responsibility for the result. A system that delivers finished-looking imagery more directly could reduce the number or scope of those encounters.
Scott does not portray technological change as avoidable. His warning is instead about what may be lost if the industry treats generated output as equivalent to the development process behind original work. He has described generative AI results as uneven and suggested that they can offer an imitation of creativity rather than its full practice. The risk, as he frames it, is cultural as well as occupational: work could become more uniform if production increasingly begins and ends within similar automated systems.
That argument places special weight on early-career opportunity. Established directors may retain reputations, relationships and access to larger commissions. Those who have not yet had the opportunity to direct repeatedly are more exposed if entry-level and middle-tier work is compressed, simplified or redirected into automated workflows. The issue is therefore less a prediction that all directing will disappear than a warning about who gets the assignments that build a career.
WPP’s model is built around speed, volume and lower costs
WPP’s east London opening gives a concrete business setting to the debate. The facility is the first in an international rollout for WPP Production, a business described as having a £600m scale. The group says its approach brings AI capabilities together with production expertise in order to lower costs, move more quickly and produce material for a growing number of outlets.
The commercial rationale is clear within the claims made about the project. Brands no longer communicate through a limited set of placements or rely on one campaign to run unchanged for a long period. They are seeking more content for more digital channels. Under those conditions, a production process that can create, adapt and distribute material at greater speed has an obvious appeal to clients focused on budgets and responsiveness.
An unnamed industry source cited in the report said certain advertisements can be made for up to 60% less using AI. That figure should be handled cautiously. The account does not identify the type of advert, the underlying comparison, the range of production costs included, or the number of projects on which it is based. It is a reported assertion from one unnamed source, not a demonstrated industry-wide measure of savings.
Even so, the claim captures the incentive facing buyers of advertising. If a client can obtain usable material more cheaply, it may direct spending towards AI-led production, particularly for work requiring multiple versions or rapid turnaround. The same source also said such output may look formulaic and that a director’s role can be reduced. The tension is central: cost savings are commercially attractive, but the creative consequences may become apparent in the work itself and in the jobs that once supported its making.
For production companies, this is not only a technical choice. It is an operating-model choice. A business organised around more output at lower marginal cost may allocate people, time and money differently from one built around conventional shoots. That could change which capabilities are commissioned from outside suppliers, how teams collaborate and how much room directors have to shape a piece from conception to final delivery.
The employment question has no settled answer
Richard Glasson, chief executive of WPP Production, rejects the assumption that AI necessarily means fewer jobs in production. He characterises the technology as an enabler of a larger volume of content and says people working in the sector are adapting to it. His position rests on demand: if clients require vastly more material across a wider set of channels, a tool that increases output may expand opportunities instead of simply replacing existing roles.
Glasson also argues that major, traditional campaigns remain part of the market. He has pointed to Super Bowl advertising, World Cup campaigns and productions involving celebrities and distant locations as work that continues to be made and will continue to require creative talent. In this view, AI does not erase the premium end of advertising; it sits alongside it, helping production meet a broader and faster stream of content requests.
That is a materially different forecast from Scott’s. Glasson’s argument allows for changing tools and changing tasks while maintaining that workers can move with the technology. Scott’s argument is concerned with the quality and availability of formative work, and with whether an abundance of content necessarily creates comparable opportunities to learn directing in the physical and collaborative conditions that shaped earlier careers.
Neither position, on the material available, resolves the other. More content could mean more production activity, as WPP contends, while still changing the distribution of work away from the assignments that provide directorial development. Equally, fewer conventional shoots in some categories would not by itself establish an overall decline in production employment. The report provides competing assessments, not a full accounting of jobs, commissions, career progression or the mix of tasks before and after AI adoption.
The crucial issue is the kind of work being created
The dispute is therefore more precise than a simple choice between innovation and resistance. The relevant question is what work is produced, who has authority over it and what practical experience it offers. A rapid, AI-assisted production process may be well suited to the multiplication and adaptation of brand material. A large campaign with a distinctive visual ambition may call for a different structure and a clearer directorial role. Both can exist, but their relative weight will shape career paths.
For brands, the choice may involve a trade-off between immediate efficiency and a creative identity that avoids repetition. For agencies and production companies, it involves deciding whether efficiency gains are reinvested in people and ambitious work, or used primarily to reduce the cost of delivering routine material. For emerging directors, the answer may determine whether commercial work remains a ladder toward larger projects or becomes a narrower technical function.
The available account offers no evidence that AI has already closed that ladder across Britain, nor does it establish that it has secured an employment boom. It reports a live industry argument driven by an investment programme, client demand for more content, an asserted prospect of lower-cost adverts and contrasting judgments from senior figures on what those forces will mean.
There is also no settled measure here of creative quality. The anonymous source’s description of some AI-assisted adverts as formulaic is a view, not an independent assessment of a defined body of campaigns. Conversely, WPP Production’s confidence that the technology enables abundance is a business leader’s assessment of the opportunity, not proof that every role or career stage will benefit equally.
The report has not been independently corroborated. Its claims and competing interpretations come from a single published account and include statements by interested industry participants as well as an unnamed source. The central uncertainty is whether AI expands the total amount of production work while preserving the hands-on assignments through which future directors learn, or whether the efficiencies now being pursued weaken that route before an alternative pathway emerges.
For further context on this subject, see NASA Opens Applications for Next Flight Director Class.
Reporting notes
What is confirmed: WPP says AI will support greater content volume. Luke Scott fears it could diminish practical creative opportunities.
Why this matters: Commercial production can provide formative directing experience; AI may alter both its economics and the kinds of entry-level work available.
What remains unclear: The source does not establish whether AI will reduce overall production jobs or preserve meaningful routes into directing. This report is based on one source and has not been independently corroborated.
