The best AI tools for advertising agencies in 2026
The best AI tool for an advertising agency in 2026 depends on what you are replacing. General assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini cover individual productivity. Springboards and Waldo are built for agency ideation. Holding-company platforms like WPP Open suit networks. Multiply is built for independent agencies running many clients end to end.
Most agencies are not choosing from zero
The tool you are comparing against is rarely nothing. It is usually ChatGPT or Claude, often set up by a consultant who built the prompt library. That setup works, and it produces good output. Judge it on what happens to the output afterwards: whether anything accumulates, whether one client's context stays separate from another's, and whether the capability survives the consultant leaving.
Six categories, and what each is actually for
Grouped by what they replace rather than by feature count. Most agencies end up running more than one.
General assistants: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini
The default, and the real incumbent. ChatGPT's Projects, custom GPTs and Enterprise workspaces cover a surprising amount of ground. Claude is strong on reasoning and long-context work, which makes it a common choice for strategy and long-form. Gemini is bundled with Google Workspace, so it is effectively free to agencies already there. Best for individual productivity. Weakest on client separation and on anything that has to compound across a team.
Agency-native platforms: Springboards, Waldo
Purpose-built for agency and strategist workflows. Springboards describes itself as the AI platform accelerating creativity in advertising, was co-founded by ex-agency strategists Pip Bingemann and Amy Tucker, and is backed by more than 120 agencies and a $5M seed from Blackbird Ventures. It is weighted towards ideation. Waldo overlaps with it and publishes less about itself. Best if your bottleneck is generating ideas rather than running the work around them.
Holding-company operating systems: WPP Open, Stagwell's The Machine
Agentic marketing platforms built on a network's own audience and behavioural data. WPP Open Pro is a self-serve tier aimed at brands running campaigns themselves. Publicis, Omnicom, Dentsu and Havas are all shipping equivalents. Best if you already sit inside that network. An independent agency cannot buy one, and rarely wants to run its client work on a competitor's infrastructure.
Content generation tools: Jasper, Copy.ai, Writer
Focused on marketing copy and brand-consistent output, with Jasper the most established of the three. Best when the job really is producing volume of copy. They cover the output rather than the process that leads to it, so research, briefing and strategy sit outside them.
Work management with AI attached: Monday, Notion AI, Asana
AI added to a task or knowledge tool you may already run. Best for coordination and tracking. The AI is an add-on to the workflow rather than the thing doing the work, and none of them are built specifically for agency client work.
Multiply
Ours, so read this entry with that in mind. Multiply is an Agency Operating System. Work is structured as org, workspace, project and task, so a client's brand guidelines and history are set once on their workspace and steer every project underneath. It covers research through delivery rather than ideation alone, agencies build and own their own agents, and it is GDPR compliant with ISO 27001 in progress and no training on customer data. Best for independent agencies running several clients at once. Not the cheapest way to make one person write faster.
Four questions that narrow the list.
Can it hold several clients' contexts apart without them bleeding into each other? Is it built for creative work, or is it a general productivity tool with agency language in the marketing? Where does your data live, and is it used to train anyone's model? And does context survive a handoff from a strategist to a creative? Those four answers cut the shortlist faster than any feature comparison.
Own the first coffee of the ski day.
Nordvik's winter sales peak a month before its campaigns start. Three resorts have opened tenders for café partners.
Common questions
Anything specific to how your agency runs is easier to answer on a walkthrough.
The best AI tool for an advertising agency in 2026 depends on what you are replacing. General assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini cover individual productivity. Springboards and Waldo are built for agency ideation. Holding-company platforms like WPP Open suit networks. Multiply is built for independent agencies running many clients end to end.
There is no single winner because the categories solve different problems. Pick by what you are replacing: individual productivity, idea generation, network infrastructure, copy volume, or the operation that runs client work end to end.
For one person doing isolated tasks, usually yes. It stops being enough at the point the agency needs the work to accumulate. Prompts live in individual chat histories, every session starts from zero, and there is no structural separation between one client's context and another's.
The honest test is what happens when the person who set it up leaves. If the capability leaves with them, the agency was renting its own process.
Ask how the platform separates client brand contexts and what happens when they conflict, where your data is stored and whether it trains anyone's model, how a brief moves from strategy to creative, and what collaboration looks like across a team rather than for one user.
Bring a live account to the walkthrough
We will show you what Multiply finds in the files that account already has.