Publicis has outlined its strategy to become the industry’s first “AI-powered intelligent system” with plans to invest €300m over the next three years, with the ultimate aim of turning everyone – from creatives and production teams to “suits” and senior management – into data experts to “supercharge client growth”.
After outperforming rivals for the fourth year in a row, with organic growth of +6.3% in 2023, Publicis Groupe claims it has truly become a partner in its clients’ transformation.
Through three strategic areas – putting data and technology at the centre with the acquisition of Sapient and Epsilon, implementing a country model, and building a single operational backbone – the group maintains it has shifted from a holding company to a platform.
This move, it claims, now positions the group to fully harness the power of AI, to become a 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.
Publicis is now infusing a layer of AI across its organisation 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 AI expertise and partnerships, which span designing chips for Nvidia that are used in the training of AI models like ChatGPT, to developing AI-powered digital consumer journeys across multiple industries.
Sitting at the centre of the group, it is claimed CoreAI unifies all of Publicis’ proprietary data, including 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 the Marcel AI platform, all combined with 35 years of business transformation data and coding owned by Publicis Sapient.
CoreAI makes those data points shareable and accessible to everyone at Publicis, super powering them across five key disciplines:
– Insight: 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 optimisation will deliver new levels of accuracy and outcomes positioning clients to win at commerce sooner and faster.
– Creative and production: Personalised content will finally be realised at scale, with efficiencies and highly relevant, desirable creative.
– Software: 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.
The group began engineering CoreAI in the second half of 2023 and plans to iteratively roll out capabilities in the first half of 2024. For this year alone, the group anticipates an investment of €100m; half will be spent on people, including upskilling, training and recruitment, and half on technology, through licences, IT software and cloud infrastructure.
Publicis Group CEO Arthur Sadoun said: “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.
“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.”
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