EXCLUSIVE: Omnicom Offloads Hundreds of Staffers Who Built Its AI Platform to Third-Party Contractor

Ah, marvellous. Omnicom has discovered the most efficient form of corporate estate planning yet: quietly transferring at least 468 product and engineering staff who built its Omni AI platform to contractor Endava, while separately sacking about 50 US employees from the same division in June. Nothing says 'we believe in our proprietary AI future' like paying someone else to employ the people who made it exist. The word 'transfer' is doing heroic labour here — it is the HR equivalent of placing a beloved pet in a 'forever home' that turns out to be a sausage factory.

The advertising holding company apparently calculates that the platform's brain is now sufficiently well-trained that the original wizards can be swapped for whatever cheaper magicians Endava has on call. This is the same logic that led newspapers to outsource their websites to the cheapest CMS vendor, with consequences now unfolding across local news homepages. The departing employees likely received a slide thanking them for their 'passion' and a badge promising they were joining a 'dynamic partner ecosystem' — though for the 50 laid off in June, the parting gift was presumably an offboarding portal and a muted Zoom.

Let's be clear about what this 'transfer' actually is: a mass offboarding dressed up as supply-chain optimisation, with Endava as the human-recycling bin. Adland loves to pretend its data platforms are strategic moats, but this move reveals the real moat is the wage bill. The 468 will now build the same Omni platform for a third party, presumably at a discount, while the 50 June casualties are the advance guard sent to test the job market. Omnicom's shareholders should enjoy the savings right up until the moment the platform starts explaining that a client's campaign failed because the model was trained by people no longer in the room.