AI agent sprawl is one of the fastest-growing governance challenges for any organization with multiple teams building agents — and Stagwell solved it by building an internal marketplace.

In this episode, Merrill Raman, Global CTO of Stagwell, explains how the company's network of 70+ marketing and advertising agencies build, publish, share, and license AI agents through a centralized Agent Cloud — with real financial incentives for the teams that create them.

Merrill explains how Stagwell applies the 80/20 rule to technology standardization, why agent discoverability is the antidote to agent sprawl, and what the emotional journey of AI adoption actually looks like for leaders and their teams. He also shares why you should redesign your workflow before applying AI — not after.

Download our AI terminology cheat sheet: [AI Terminology Cheat Sheet link]

Talk to an Insight AI specialist because you'll get a direct conversation about how to govern and scale AI agents inside your organization: https://www.insight.com/en_US/what-we-do/expertise/data-and-ai/generative-ai.html

Subscribe to Insight On for more conversations on the agent economy.

Chapters (5–12)

00:00 — Welcome and introduction to Stagwell's agent story
01:12 — How Stagwell started building AI agents

02:09 — Why 70 agencies need a shared agent foundation

04:03 — What the Agent Cloud is and how it works

06:22 — How agencies publish and discover agents

07:46 — The internal licensing marketplace model

09:01 — Turning agents into SaaS revenue streams

11:30 — Agent examples: AI moderator for market research

13:13 — Keeping humans in the loop at agent scale

14:00 — AI-driven content personalization workflows

15:20 — Biggest lessons from the agent development journey

16:44 — The emotional arc of AI adoption for leaders #AIAgents #AgentGovernance #GenerativeAI #InsightOn