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Britain’s WPP named board member Cindy Rose as its new chief executive on Thursday, tasking the senior Microsoft executive with leading its recovery a day after a major profit warning showed the scale of the challenge at the ad group. Rose has been on the board since 2019 and will take over from outgoing CEO Mark Read on Sept. 1, the company said, with Read departing four months earlier than expected. Shares in the group, which fell to a 16-year low on Wednesday after it slashed its profit outlook, rose 2% in early deals. Rose has spent the last nine years in senior leadership positions at Microsoft, where she rose to Chief Operating Officer, Global Enterprise after formerly being head of its UK business. Prior to that she worked at Vodafone and Virgin Media. WPP Chairman Philip Jansen said she had supported the digital transformation of large enterprises around the world including embracing artificial intelligence to create new business models and revenue streams. “Her expertise in this landscape will be hugely valuable to WPP as the industry navigates fundamental changes and macroeconomic uncertainty,” he said. Rose will take on a business reeling from the loss of some big accounts, a downturn in client spend, and fewer new business opportunities, which prompted the profit outlook cut that sent WPP shares down as much as 19% on Wednesday. WPP, which lost its crown as the world’s biggest ad group to France’s Publicis last year, is also grappling with the transformational impact of AI, which gives clients the tools to create and manage more of their own marketing campaigns. Rose said: “We have and continue to build market-leading AI capabilities, alongside an unrivalled reputation for creative excellence and a preeminent client list.” Sarah Young, Reuters
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E-Commerce
Minh Pham and JJ Ford have a knack for riding the waves of new tech. The duo joined Uber in its early days, helping to spearhead mobile development. When CEO Travis Kalanick was ousted in 2017, Pham and Ford followed him out. Kalanick soon founded CloudKitchensand Ford was his first call. Fords first call? Pham. After five years at CloudKitchens, they were ready for the next frontier. Over the years, theyd built a battle-tested engineering team that successfully tackled both the mobile surge at Uber and the infrastructure demands at CloudKitchens. They also had a hunch: While many startups were focused on building single-use AI agents, Pham and Ford saw the future in orchestrating many agents to work together. In 2023, they founded the California-based company Invisible. How do you build a system that allows one person to manage thousands of agents? Ford asks, noting that he and Pham used their enterprise experience to develop a solution thats different from any theyve seen in the market previously. Inside Invisible Most AI agents today handle single tasksordering food, booking travelwithout human input. Pham compares them to task assistants. But Invisibles product stacks these agents, enabling them to tackle multiple tasks in parallel. We want to turn AI agents into an elastic, reliable, and scalable workforce for a company, Pham says. Most companies think of using a single agent from Anthropic or OpenAI. We think of it as an orchestration platform for multiple agents, acting like how you have a team of humans doing work. From left: Justin Takamine (CTO), Minh Pham (CEO), Hanna Dang (COO), and JJ Ford (CSO). [Photo: Invisible] Invisibles system is hierarchical. A top-level agent breaks down a task, delegates subtasks to lower-level agents, and coordinates the process. What we found is, when you have a hierarchy of agents like that, the sum is much larger than what a single agent could do, Pham says. Three months ago, Invisible launched A3, short for Action Agent API. While they declined to share revenue, Pham and Ford confirmed a $7 million fundraising round last year. Their customers, Pham says, include large-scale companies like mortgage brokers and solar providers. “Were already running pilots and engaging in active discussions with dozens of Fortune-scale enterprises eager to deploy A3 and streamline their most critical workflows,” Minh says. Stacking a workforce A3 operates on a companys existing standard operating procedures. Uber, for instance, has hundreds of thousands of playbooks. Once A3 is trained on these, a company can scale its agent workforce up or down as needed. Pham cites the example of Know Your Customer checksan expensive compliance requirement in fintech. The work involves compiling detailed reports to verify legitimacy and creditworthiness, often through manual research. We were able to go in and completely automate this process within days of working with the company, Pham says. Invisible is priced like a workforce, too. Unlike competitors that use a subscription model, Invisible charges 10 cents per action. According to Pham, that usually adds up to about $12 per hourroughly the cost of a human workerand could decrease as AI costs drop. We want to think of it as a workforce, and we have to come up with a whole new pricing model to match that, Pham says. Ford adds that per-action pricing makes it easy for companies to easily come online, stand up a workforce, make it elastic, and then pull it down. The implications of an AI agent workforce are far-reachingand potentially disruptive. Still, the founders emphasize the upside. A3, Ford says, allows employees to climb the value chain of what theyre delivering to the company. For better or worse, the agents are coming. And Invisible is betting theyll be most powerful when stacked.
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Yesterday evening, President Trump announced on Truth Social that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy would take over as interim administrator of NASA. The space agency has been without an official leader since the president took office in January; Janet Petro, the director of Kennedy Space Center in Florida, has been serving as the acting administrator until now. The road to nominating a leader for the space agency has been a rocky one for Trump. Back in December, the president-elect named Jared Isaacman, CEO of Shift4 Payments and a private astronaut, as his nominee for NASA administrator. Critics flagged Isaacmans close ties to Elon Musk as a hurdle to his confirmation (Isaacman conducted the first private spacewalk along with Sarah Gillis on Polaris Dawn, a mission for which he paid SpaceX). However, the president withdrew Isaacmans nomination on May 31 after a public fallout with billionaire Elon Musk. Trump later cited Isaacmans close ties to the SpaceX CEO as part of the reason for the withdrawal, in addition to his political leanings. (Trump claimed Isaacman is a Democrat, while Isaacman characterized himself as a right-leaning moderate in a post on X.) Now, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former Republican congressman and reality television star, is set to inherit a tumultuous set of circumstances at NASA. The presidents budget proposes cutting almost 50% of the agencys science funding, which experts say would be a devastating blow, cancelling 19 active science missions. However, members of the Senate appropriations committee have indicated they intend to restore much of NASAs science funding. Additionally, a recent report from POLITICO indicates that over 2,000 of NASAs senior staff are set to depart the agency in coming months. These civil servants have accepted the early retirements, buyouts, and deferred resignations that were on offer as a result of Trumps budget cuts and efforts to reduce the size of the federal government workforce. This leadership brain drain will likely have drastic impacts to the agency, and the cuts only make up half of what the president has stated hed like to see for NASA. This means there may be more to come. NASA did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
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