Brandtech’s David Jones: ‘Why not do 95% of it with fast, efficient machines?’

David Jones is late for our meeting at his Manhattan office because his car got stuck behind a garbage truck. But the British founder of the AI and digital advertising group Brandtech does not complain. “I grew up in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “If you’re going to be in a city, be in the biggest, noisiest, best.”

Jones was raised in a village in Cheshire but now lives and works in New York and is often in a hurry. “He walks fast and talks fast. I feel quite slow next to him,” says one of his partners. Our initial meeting was postponed because Jones missed a flight from London, where he was pitching for business: “I arrived at 7.20 for a 7.25pm flight and, funnily enough, they wouldn’t let me through,” he says.

The chief executive is also in a hurry to shake up marketing, which has faced waves of disruption in the past decade. Social media, TikTok influencers and short-form digital ads have been followed by AI threatening to take the place of human creativity at the heart of the industry. The 59-year-old former chief executive of French advertising group Havas can claim to have seen much of the revolution coming.

He founded Brandtech in 2015 after leaving Havas and raising $300mn from investors including the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust managed by Baillie Gifford, which also holds a stake in SpaceX. The fundraising took only six weeks, which Jones attributes to the can-do spirit of his adopted home. “This city is incredible. In most places in the world, people would laugh you out of the room.”

But industry optimism is now in shorter supply, even in New York. The value of the UK’s biggest agency group WPP has fallen sharply in the past few years, along with that of S4 Capital, the digital ad company founded by former WPP chief Sir Martin Sorrell. Amid the industry’s struggles to adapt to technological change, the $4bn value ascribed to Brandtech when it raised another $115mn from new investors in 2024 made Jones look like a rare success. That valuation is…