Yannick Bolloré: 'AI embedded at the core of all we do'

Havas has launched a counter-attack against WPP Media’s AI strategy – unveiled last week – by using Cannes Lions as a platform to big up its own AI toolkit, effectively boasting “ours is bigger and better than yours”.

Last year at Cannes, Havas committed to investing €400m in data, tech and AI over the following four years as part of its global strategy and operating system, now renamed Converged.AI to reflect recent advancements.

The agency group maintains that Converged.AI fuses talent, capabilities, platforms and expertise to deliver cross-functional, fully integrated communications solutions for clients.

Today, Havas has not actually committed any more cash but instead insisted the €400m commitment will run through 2027. It has also shared the latest outcomes of this investment with a fully AI-enabled product suite across targeting and activation, analytics, dynamic intelligence, planning & decisioning, content personalisation, and creative production.

As Havas enters the second year of the strategy investment will apparently focus on “evolving the group’s agent-enabled capabilities into a human-led agentic ecosystem fully deployed across the organisation to power client-centric solutions at speed” – whatever that means.

Havas CEO and chairman Yannick Bolloré said: “Our transformation is delivering real impact for our clients. We believe innovation happens where empathic human understanding meets machine precision. We are now moving beyond creating efficiencies to exploring entirely new frontiers, with AI embedded at the core of everything we do. Today, I’m proud to unveil new tools like Vermeer, our next-gen video production platform, that showcase how we’re giving our talents and the brands we champion a competitive edge with AI at speed.”

Havas’ Converged.AI product suite now includes tools that can build and match compliant, privacy-first audiences directly into global platforms such as Google, Meta and Amazon, as well as local providers such as TF1 and ITV.

CSA, Havas’ global technology, data and analytics consultancy, meanwhile, has been integrated into the Converged.AI platform, using AI to merge different measurement techniques and fill the gaps in attribution with calibration experiments and machine learning models.

In addition, a series of agents can develop and execute code and retrieve, format, visualise and display data, creating dashboards that can extract data in real-time in response to natural language queries.

There is also a tool that combines CSA’s analytics suite with the Converged.AI reporting cloud, using clients’ performance data to predict future scenarios and fuel AI driven planning and decisioning.

Finally, Havas claims clients can produce personalised content at scale, tapping into Havas’ Adobe partnership within Converged.AI.

Havas chief data and technology officer Dan Hagen commented: “We’re building AI solutions that not only automate everyday tasks, but fuel collaboration to deliver extraordinary results for clients. Our AI-ready workforce is an integral part of this vision, and we’ve democratised the solutions development process to allow end user subject matter experts – creatives, planners, insight experts and more – to create products based on the challenges they encounter working with clients every day.”