WPP Shares Slide 4% Despite Amazon AWS Partnership Announcement

The advertising giant’s new AI collaboration failed to impress investors already rattled by months of revenue downgrades and profit warnings.

WPP (LON: WPP) fell sharply on Thursday, closing down 4.4% at 272.1p on the London Stock Exchange — erasing nearly 13 pence in value from a previous close of 284.6p — even as the world’s largest advertising group unveiled a high-profile artificial intelligence partnership with Amazon Web Services.

WPP Enterprise Solutions, the company’s global business transformation unit, announced a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with AWS, designed to help enterprise brands move beyond AI experimentation and deploy production-grade agentic AI systems at scale. The deal, which includes tools built on Amazon Bedrock and available through AWS Marketplace, promises clients up to a 90% reduction in content production time and a 40% cut in content costs.

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Yet markets were unmoved. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, leaving investors with little concrete data to price into the stock.

The muted reaction reflects a deeper crisis of confidence in WPP. The group has issued multiple profit warnings over the past year, including a guidance cut in October 2025 that sent shares crashing 16% to their lowest level since 1998. Half-year results published in August 2025 showed revenue down 7.8% on a reported basis.

The broader market also offered no shelter, with the FTSE 100 itself falling 1.12% on the day.

Analysts note that while the AWS deal signals WPP’s intent to pivot toward AI-driven services, the announcement risks underscoring a broader concern — that artificial intelligence is gradually reducing client dependency on traditional advertising agencies, the very business WPP has long dominated.