Adrian Cutler

I see where we need to go before it's obvious, and I get people behind it whether or not they report to me.

• I founded Agent Zero, Microsoft Advertising's first large-scale agentic AI programme, which won the MAI Impact Award.
• Most of my recent impact has come through people who don't report to me, including 774 colleagues mobilised in a single day.
• The change held: Copilot use rose 48% and settled at a new high of 98%.

When something important is going wrong, I'm the one who steadies it, finds the real cause and leaves it growing.

I learned this in media agency life, handling some of the toughest client situations.

• When I inherited a large global FMCG client, it had years of unreconciled billing, no consistency at scale and was heading to pitch. I put a specialist on the billing and built a Paid Search Toolkit with its central team that scaled to every market. The client reshaped how it worked, asked us to advise on its restructure, cancelled the pitch and stayed.
• I turned thirteen months of decline at Publicis Search into +7.8% growth year to date, at 101% attainment.
• At iProspect I took a team from a 10% to a 41% operating margin in twelve months, through a new commercial model, clearer ways of working and paid search toolkits clients paid for, not by cutting headcount.

I don't just win the relationship; I design the commercial model that makes the deal work for both sides.

• I saw that the existing model left markets delivering global wins at a loss, so I created a data-led FTE model. It helped win the $2.1bn General Motors account with markets in profit, and became dentsu's global standard for paid search pricing, still in use today.
• I took dentsu from fifth to first among Microsoft Advertising's agency partners, growing revenue from $300M to more than $420M a year.
• I won a $40M dentsu commitment to Netflix advertising in two weeks, raised to $70M by launch.
• I wrote a multi-year dentsu plan worth about $120M and set up a meeting between Satya Nadella and dentsu's chief executive.

I started as an engineer, so I can handle the technical conversation and the boardroom one, and take AI from pilot to revenue.

• Working with Microsoft's enterprise account team, I won an Azure AI analytics programme against AWS. It went live in under twelve weeks, cut time to insight by 90% and is expected to bring $117M in revenue and $18M in savings.
• I lead GEO (generative engine optimisation) and the Microsoft Clarity rollout with agency partners. I tested GEO on my wife's website, which then ranked in the top three in AI chat answers and on the first page of Google and Bing.
• I created an X400 secure gateway between the UK and France for MoD secure message transit, and was named among Novell's top 200 engineers worldwide, advising Dr Eric Schmidt on network scalability.

I build teams people want to stay in, and people who go on to run their own.

• My Wows and Help Me Nows coaching routine took team health to 94%, the highest in Microsoft UK.
• Where staff turnover was costing money and client performance, and most people left within a year, I kept my whole London core team for more than two years. Five of the fifteen graduates I trained went on to run agencies.
• I raised diverse hiring by 40% in eighteen months and reset salaries at dentsu regardless of gender, a model still in use today.