How WPP Built an Agent Platform to Turn Calls Into Project Plans For The World's Biggest Consumer Brands

WPP is a global creative and tech company and the parent entity of agencies like VML, Ogilvy, and AKQA. Across its network, WPP is responsible for work for brands like Nike, TikTok, and Coca-Cola. Its media business manages more than $60B in annual investment.

WPP's client work extends beyond campaigns. They create commerce platforms, digital experiences, and supporting software. So the company built Developer Studio, an internal Mastra-powered platform to turn technical calls into implementation-ready work for eng teams. It now runs in internal production within WPP's 100k-person organization.

From discovery calls to engineering work

WPP already had WPP Open, an agentic platform supporting creative, campaign, and marketing work. But they needed something focused on the software-delivery lifecycle, too.

Their tech and commerce engagements produce a lot of technical workshops, project documents, Jira tickets, repos, and support incidents. Turning that material into something actionable for engineers was manual and involved a ton of handoffs.

Developer Studio puts AI inside that process. A business analyst can upload the transcript from a technical call, run it through a structured Mastra workflow, review the proposed epics, stories, and tasks, and publish the approved output into the target environment.

Why WPP chose Mastra

WPP's engineering stack is primarily Node.js and TypeScript. Darren Smith, who leads Developer Studio, began with direct model SDKs and then moved to Vercel's AI tooling. He started building a lightweight workflow engine when he came across Mastra.

Mastra provided workflows, agents, and tools in the same ecosystem the team already used. So they switched. They could replace custom orchestration and still choose whether a task should be a deterministic workflow, an agent, or an MCP tool.

"Mastra builds the thing I need a few months before I need it." — Darren Smith, Lead Software Engineer

Inside Developer Studio's architecture

Developer Studio is a Node.js and TypeScript platform. It uses Mastra as an orchestration layer, and an OAuth-authenticated MCP gateway as the integration layer.

Teams use the platform through the Developer Studio web interface and Windsurf, with integrations for Jira, Confluence, uHub, Slack, and New Relic.

Here's how it's built. A Mastra workflow is triggered with a request from the web interface. It extracts text from the source material, uses agents for interpretation if needed and calls MCP tools to read/write project data.

A human can then review the output in the Developer Studio's UI. The team also connected Windsurf through the MCP gateway. The gateway can expose an agent, workflow, or individual operation as a tool. So devs have access to the same capabilities without creating a second backend.

Access and authentication are key here, because the platform is used across different agencies and many customer accounts. The gateway only accepts OAuth-authenticated requests and federates the user's identity downstream. Access depends on the user's internal scope, the client they can access, and their permissions in the target Jira project. So the client isolation doesn't depend on instructions in a model prompt because it sits in the integration layer.

When it comes to deployment, WPP works across Jira Cloud, self-hosted Jira, its customized internal Jira environment called uHub, and Jira instances owned by clients. The team's MCP integrations and OAuth flows enable publishing into the correct environment.

Results and what's next

As the platform expands, it's getting harder to expose every low-level Jira operation. So the team is considering a virtual MCP layer that would put related operations behind specialists—for example, one Jira agent with a constrained set of Jira tools—so the top-level agent doesn't have to search the entire catalog.

They also plan to build a shared project graph connecting uploaded files, Confluence, Jira, GitHub repositories, and deployments.

Developer Studio already gives WPP a faster, safer path from client discovery to implementation. The goal now is to turn the knowledge generated along the way into something more persistent, a delivery intel, that would let them reuse more and deliver work even faster.