Welcome in, today is Wednesday, August twelfth, and we begin with WPP, where Pulse 2.0 has fresh numbers on what the restructure is selling in order to fund itself. Per Pulse 2.0, WPP now expects more than two hundred million pounds of proceeds from asset sales during 2026, based on disposals completed and underway, with further divestitures still under evaluation. Set that against the five hundred million pound gross annualized savings target by 2028 we have been tracking, and the funding picture shifts. The agentic-AI rebuild is being paid for in part by selling non-core businesses, not by cost reduction alone. The same reporting has first-half revenue down four point four percent, to six point three seven three billion pounds. Headline operating margin still improved, to eight point four percent from eight point two, which that account credits to lower staff and severance costs and other savings. On structure, and following our earlier reporting on the first-half results, client delivery is now organized into four operating units across four regions, with WPP Open as the connecting agentic platform, alongside a new unified Enterprise Solutions business aimed at enterprise AI transformation work. That account also has technology partnerships with Google, Meta and AWS expanded during the second quarter, and a predictive Cultural Intelligence Engine built with Google Cloud already deployed with clients. Industry reaction leans skeptical that the plan is genuinely on track, with a recurring thread setting the savings and AI-platform framing against falling revenue and the scale of the job cuts. Also today, a further cut of the AI proficiency research we covered on Monday. Sixty-nine percent of marketers say their company mandates or strongly encourages using artificial intelligence. Forty-three percent say they have received no formal training on it. That is NewtonX, surveying five hundred marketers on behalf of Adweek. The gap is the finding. Where Monday's read put the skills deficit at the top of the organisation, this one puts it across the workforce, with the instruction to use the tools arriving well ahead of any instruction in how. That locates the adoption bottleneck in enablement rather than in tooling. In the study's own words, the people making AI strategy decisions are the least equipped to evaluate them. That reporting also carries a counter-example from outside the marketing org. Cynthia Chen, founder and chief executive of the fintech firm Kikoff, describes running internal AI Days that cover productivity use cases alongside compliance and regulation. Separately, Digiday puts a cost line under the AI services pitch. Sam Bradley reports that S4 Capital and Monks are trying to get ahead of rising AI token costs, in an account that describes Monks as considered a leader in AI marketing services and says what it calls exploding token use poses difficult questions for executives focused on keeping costs down. The word exploding is that piece's, in quotation marks. Read it with what the same outlet reported in July, that the cost of AI has been absorbed into principal media arrangements without an explicit price attached, and the argument converges from two directions. Consumption is variable and rising, while the fee quoted to the client is not. That is a margin question sitting inside the deal rather than beside it. Some practitioners flag that token costs tend to break in production rather than in planning, the concern being that real users paste far more context than pilot assumptions allow, so budgets modeled on tidy test usage read as an early warning rather than a forecast. A recurring counterpoint is that the harder problem is governance rather than pricing, with cheaper models increasingly good enough for routine work, and autonomous agents making their own spending decisions the real control question. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. The Media Online argues creative and media were separated for billing reasons rather than strategic ones, and that reintegration will fail unless holding groups change the commercial model underneath it. Marketing Dive reports Procter and Gamble's Always Discreet is running its biggest media activation to date, Protect the Moment, featuring three mothers of NFL players across ads and social. And finally, Marketing Dive reports CeraVe is using home renovation tropes in a social series to pitch Gen Z on SPF, against a tanmaxxing trend running the other way.