Publicis Puts #AI At Its Core
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
After significantly outperforming its industry for the fourth year in a row, with organic growth of +6.3% in 2023, Publicis Groupe [Euronext Paris FR0000130577, CAC 40] last week set out its strategy to become the industry’s first #AI-powered Intelligent Sys
In the last six years, Publicis has become a partner in its clients’ transformation. Through three 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 – it has shifted from a holding company to a platform.
That platform organization has allowed Publicis to outperform the market on both financial and extra-financial KPIs. But it also now 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, and putting them into the hands of all of its people.
In short, thanks to the shift to an Intelligent System company, everyone within Publicis will become a data analyst, an engineer, an intelligence partner, with all the information they need at their fingertips to supercharge client growth.
Publicis is infusing a layer of AI across its platform organization to connect its enterprise knowledge under one entity: CoreAI.
The group is building this unifying AI-led foundation in-house and across its full enterprise, thanks to 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.
Sitting at 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 35 years of business transformation data and coding owned exclusively by Publicis Sapient.
CoreAI makes those trillions of data points shareable and accessible to everyone at Publicis, super powering them across 5 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 finally 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 not months.
- Operations: Groupe operations and client management systems will be boosted with speed, accuracy and efficiency.
Publicis plans to invest three hundred million euros over the next three years as it becomes a true Intelligent System. For 2024 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 began engineering CoreAI in the second half of 2023 and plans to iteratively roll out capabilities in the first half of 2024. It will present MVPs at Viva Tech 2024 this upcoming May.
Arthur Sadoun, CEO & Chairman of Publicis Groupe commented: “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.
Putting CoreAI at the heart of our organization and truly becoming an Intelligent System company will make our people more efficient and more productive. But way more importantly, it will allow everyone to do things tomorrow that no one can do today, guided by the highest ethical standards, and at the service of our clients’ growth.
As we enter our second century, we are confident that all of the efforts we have made to transform and the ongoing investment we are making in our people and technology will allow Publicis to continue to outperform its peers on organic growth, sustain the highest financial KPIs, and lead the change in our industry.”
The investment in AI of 100 million euros in 2024 will be fully funded by internal efficiencies. It will have no dilutive impact on Groupe’s Operating margin in 2024 and it will be slightly accretive on Operating margin in 2025.
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