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Andy Doyle has a title that I’ve never seen elsewhere: Chief People and Agent Officer. Today he joins me on the podcast to talk about the title and the numbers behind the title. Kantar has around 12,000 employees and around 15,000 agents (!), so the agents already outnumber the people, and that gap widens every week. And who built them? Well, most of them were built by colleagues who wanted their own workday to be easier, not by the tech or IT department.
In January 2025, Kantar went from 300 Copilot licenses in pilot to 2,000, and three months later everybody had one. They made that bet before they knew how the productivity would pay for the licenses. (Spoiler from the episode: I really like this approach.)
But I’m getting ahead of myself; here is some of what we get into.
Why they run AI training every Tuesday
Change influencers, experimentation, and permission to fail
Kantar’s Agent Factory and the path from no-code to pro-code
The roughly 70 employees outside IT who have been trained to build agents
Examples from HR data, HR service delivery and recruitment
What happens when an agent starts being shared and needs stronger security, controls, and ownership
Andy also talks about the 30 (!) agents he has working for him personally. He also has one sentence for everyone who hasn't started yet, which I will let him deliver himself…
Listen to the episode here
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Connect with Andy on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajdoyle/
And are YOU doing interesting stuff with AI and want to be on the podcast? Reach out! johanness@sundlo.com