Ai driven collapse of big business
Dentsu is not the last. Will repeat monthly.
And then daily. A reset like no other
Dentsu’s failed attempt to sell its international operations should unsettle the entire advertising industry. Essentially no one wants to buy a $4.5 billion advertising business at a price that makes sense.
This is not a story about Dentsu’s management missteps. It is a story about structural collapse. Potential buyers reportedly judged the business “too difficult to turn around given the rise of ai.” Stripped of polite language, that means they looked at the model and could not see a credible path to future value creation. That is not a company-specific failure; it is a category failure.
For decades, advertising holding companies grew by aggregating clients, capabilities, and talent. Scale was the advantage. Bigger networks negotiated better rates, spread costs, and industrialised creativity and media execution. The assumption was that the activities being scaled were scarce and defensible.
AI has shattered that assumption. When tools can write briefs, generate concepts, plan and optimise media, and automate execution, the value of having tens of thousands of people doing those same repeatable tasks no longer compounds. It collapses. The very efficiencies the industry spent years perfecting have become commodities.
Dentsu’s plan to cut 3,400 jobs reflects this reality. But the outdated element is not leadership; it is the industrial logic of advertising itself. AI does not merely disrupt this model. It strips it of economic value.
The uncomfortable implication is this: if a profitable $4.5 billion advertising business cannot find a buyer, what exactly is the industry worth? The answer is likely limited to what AI cannot replicate—judgment, taste, strategic courage, intuition and the ability to challenge flawed assumptions. Everything else has become cost, not value.
Changing CEOs or merging into even larger networks will not solve this. That is not strategy; it is denial. When a business of this scale cannot be sold, it is not a valuation issue. It is an existential one.
Now combine the impact of ai with the imperatives of climate change, the existence of trustless systems (crypto) and the geopolitics epitomised by Donald Trump.
Make no mistake that it is all posturing. Russia or for that matter even India has enough biowarfare ammunition to annihilate the population of an entire country. You just have to poison the water supply with hexavalent chromium and unleash a covid+ virus. Add nuclear and there won’t be a single Ukrainian left alive. Now turn the tables and you can do the same to Russia. Or America. Where was the mightiest army of the world when 9/11 happened.
Cut to corporates.
All of Adani, leftover half of Ambani, HDFC, L&T, IOCL, SBI …… not one of the top 50 stocks of India is going to survive.
How will you ?
