While 88% of marketers have adopted AI within their organization, McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report recently revealed that the majority still haven’t reworked their workflows to take full advantage of the tech.
As marketing teams juggle multiple AI tools, Stagwell-owned agency Code and Theory is using CES to tease The Machine, an agentic AI operating system (OS) that layers automation and intelligence across existing marketing products rather than replacing them.
Christine Clark, Code and Theory’s head of production and marcom, told ADWEEK that The Machine will help agencies across Stagwell’s network scale content, media, and data-driven decision-making.
“It connects to everything that the team does,” said Clark. “It’s about insights and action, and those actions being automated based on workflows that we set up.”
Plugging in
The Machine is currently being adopted by early-access clients within Code and Theory, including brands such as Qualcomm, Stanley Black & Decker, and T. Rowe Price. It’s slated for a broader enterprise launch in Q1 2026.
Rather than onboarding teams on to a new interface, Code and Theory CEO Michael Treff said the platform is designed to bring intelligence into existing systems and processes.
The tech integrates directly into tools marketers already rely on, such as Adobe and Figma. It can also plug into common project management platforms, including Workfront and Monday, as well as custom-built tools used by individual brands.
Treff said this flexibility will be critical as The Machine is incorporated across multiple Stagwell agencies and clients.
In early pilot campaigns, Code and Theory has used The Machine to connect creative, media, and data workflows—allowing teams to generate multiple versions of creative, test them against specific audience segments, and optimize performance far more quickly than traditional processes.
“We’re trying to connect agencies and the work that agencies do with clients, with the tools that they use, whatever tools those may be, and the data that powers everything,” Treff said.
Treff said a common use case that has already emerged for The Machine is brief creation and audience identification, delivered using first-party client data alongside proprietary agency, third-party, and synthetic sources.
In some cases, he said, work that previously took weeks (such as audience analysis and early testing) can now be completed in hours.
For creatives, that means campaign performance and audience data can inform decisions while work is being created, rather than after assets are delivered. “If you’re a designer and you’re working on assets for campaigns, Machine is connecting you to all of the historical data, real-time data, and audience data,” Treff said.
