Advertising giant Publicis recently announced it has laid out a strategy in becoming the industry’s first “AI-powered Intelligent System.” In a presentation by Arthur Sadoun, global CEO; Carla Serrano, global CSO, Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient; Dave Penski, CEO of Publicis Media & Sam Levine Archer, Chief Solutions Architect Publicis North America, it was discussed that Publicis is making 3 strategic bets: putting data and technology at the center with the acquisition of Sapient and Epsilon, implementing a country model, and building a single operational backbone.
That platform organization enabled Publicis to outperform the market on both financial and extra-financial KPIs. But now, it also uniquely positions the group to fully harness the power of AI to become an Intelligent System company capable of connecting every data point from across every expertise, business unit, and geography.
Publicis is infusing a layer of AI across its platform organization to connect its enterprise knowledge under one entity called CoreAI. This group is building this unifying AI-led foundation in-house and across its full enterprise, utilizing Publicis Sapient’s unrivalled AI expertise and partnerships, which span supporting Nvidia in designing networking chips for AI servers to developing AI-powered digital consumer journeys across multiple industries.
As the center of the group, CoreAI unifies all of Publicis’ proprietary data, including the leading consumer data across 2.3 billion profiles of people around the world with trillions of data points about content, media, and business performance, and almost a petabyte of assets on Marcel, all combined with about 35 years of business transformation data and coding owned exclusively by Publicis Sapient.
CoreAI makes these trillions of data points shareable and accessible to everyone at Publicis, superpowering them across five key disciplines:
— Insight – Brilliant strategy, accurate analyses, and business consultant-level intelligence will power all marketing strategy and plans, transforming everyone into intelligence partners who architect client growth.
— Media – Media planning, buying and optimization will deliver new levels of accuracy and outcomes positioning clients to win at commerce sooner and faster.
— Creative + Production – Personalized content will be realized at scale, with efficiencies and highly relevant, desirable creative.
— Software – The best software and digitally enabled products will be brought to market at scale in days and weeks rather than months.
— Operations – Groupe operations and client management systems will be boosted with speed, accuracy and efficiency.
Publicis plans to invest €300 million over the next three years as it becomes a true Intelligent System. For this year alone, the group anticipates an investment of one hundred million euros, with 50% on people, focused on upskilling, training, and recruitment, and 50% on technology through licenses, IT software, and cloud infrastructure.
The group started engineering CoreAI in the second half of 2023 and plans to roll out capabilities in the first half of 2024 iteratively. And it will present MVPs at Viva Tech 2024 this upcoming May.
KEY QUOTE:
“Our journey from a holding company to a platform has not been easy, but it definitely paid off, as you can see with our 2023 organic growth outperforming the industry for the fourth year in a row. The platform organization we have built over the last decade, our proprietary data of unmatched breadth and accuracy, and the 45,000 engineers, consultants and data analysts at the heart of our model, uniquely position us to push the boundaries even further by leveraging AI.
– Arthur Sadoun, CEO & Chairman of Publicis Groupe
