Inside the global agency’s plan to scale strategy, speed, and storytelling with autonomous AI agents

“[causaLens agents] are an absolute necessity [for McCann]. Agents allow us to combine human input and democratise insights to not only accelerate analysis and model development but also empower our strategic business teams.”

McCann Worldgroup isn’t just one of the world’s most storied creative agencies; it’s also one of the most quietly data-driven. From global campaigns for MasterCard and L’Oréal to healthcare, B2B, and emerging tech work, McCann’s ethos is built around one idea: creative effectiveness.

And now, thanks to its work with causaLens, that effectiveness is being supercharged, not by dashboards or data tools, but by AI Agents.

“Creative effectiveness is core to everything we do,” says Annie Hou, Global Head of Data and AI at McCann. “But it’s notoriously hard to measure, and even harder to make accessible to every team. That’s where causaLens agents are helping us close the loop.”

 

From Months of Analysis to Days of Insight

In their partnership with causaLens, McCann has built agents that automate parts of a notoriously slow process: measuring brand impact and marketing effectiveness. Their current pilot centers around a framework they call the Brand Endurance Index, an internal methodology that once required weeks (sometimes months) of data wrangling, statistical modeling, and PowerPoint translation.

Now? It runs in days and doesn’t require a data scientist to operate.

“It’s not just faster,” says Hou. “It’s reproducible. Repeatable. Democratized. Our strategy and creative teams can now run these workflows without needing to code, and without depending on one person who understands causality and SQL.”

 

How AI Agents Are Changing the Creative Industry

At McCann, there is impact at both ends of the pipeline:

• On the input: Junior teams can now launch brand analysis workflows without needing to understand the statistical models underneath. What used to be locked up in technical teams is now available to strategists and creatives directly.
• On the output, because the turnaround time has collapsed, the agency can now offer advanced analytics not just to flagship clients but to every client.

That kind of scalability is rare in the agency world, where analysis is often reserved for high-paying accounts. Now, with agents doing the heavy lifting, insight becomes a standard layer of the creative process—not an optional add-on.

“As a data scientist, I love causal graphs,” Hou admitted, laughing. “But they never go down well with creative teams. Now, they don’t need to see the graph. They just get the insight.”

 

The Bigger Picture: Agents in the Agency Stack

What McCann is pioneering has broader implications for the agency and consulting world. For decades, scaling data science within agencies has meant hiring specialist teams, centralizing analysis, or outsourcing to vendors. But none of that scales easily—or globally.

Here’s what AI Agents are making possible for agencies:

• Faster turnaround for insights and testing
• Decreased reliance on rare technical talent
• New productized analytics offerings for clients
• True cross-functional collaboration between data and creative
• Global scalability of internal best practices and methods

And perhaps most importantly, when non-technical teams can explore data directly, they ask better questions. Questions the data team may never think to ask.

 

What Comes Next

McCann’s deployment is still early, but it’s already influencing how the agency hires, scopes projects, and serves clients. The combination of causaLens agents and McCann methodology is creating a new kind of creative capability: one that blends strategic insight with speed without needing to scale up the data team.

“We used to be able to offer this depth of analysis only to the biggest clients,” Hou said. “Now we can offer it to every client. That’s a massive shift.”

In the age of generative content and increasingly automated media buying, it turns out the real edge may lie in automating how you understand what works.

And McCann, with AI Agents now sitting quietly inside their creative machine, may be showing the rest of the industry how to do it.