Here's What Happens When Elephants Ride Unicycles

The big agencies have placed their bets on AI. Not small bets - we're talking $300 million fanned out on the table. Publicis and WPP aren't buying lottery tickets; they're buying futures in what they believe is the next industrial revolution.

Revolutions can be dicey undertakings as it usually comes down to how you spend the money not how much you spend. Consider the tale of two approaches:

Accenture Song (the elephant with the biggest checkbook) is going all-in. They're building an army - 57,000 AI practitioners strong, marching toward 80,000. They're making noise about partnerships with the tech giants, about platforms and scalability and enterprise solutions.

Then there's Publicis's PXP studio, quietly solving real problems that real creatives face every day. They're not trying to boil the ocean. Instead, they're asking, "How do we make storyboarding better? How do we solve the character consistency problem? How do we make localization less painful?"

The difference? One is building capacity. The other is building solutions.

Here's what's fascinating: 91% of US agencies are dabbling in AI. However, only 53% of small agencies are using it, compared to 78% of the giants.

The gap isn't about money. It's about courage.

The small agencies are waiting for permission, waiting to see what works, waiting for the path to be clear. Meanwhile, the giants are buying their way into the future, hoping money can substitute for insight. But here's what they all might be missing: AI isn't a destination. It's a unicycle. The question isn't "How much should we spend on unicycles?" The question is "Where do we want to go, and how can this unicycle help us get there faster?"

The winners won't be the ones who spent the most money. They'll be the ones who ask the best questions.