Publicis Unveils AI Strategy to Lead Group into Its Second Century

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] today set out its strategy to become the industry’s first AI-powered Intelligent System.

Click here to see the hour-long presentation by Arthur Sadoun, global CEO, Carla Serrano, global CSO, Nigel Vaz, CEO Publicis Sapient, Dave Penski, CEO Publicis Media & Sam Levine Archer, chief solutions architect Publicis North America.

Presentation overview:

From a Platform to an Intelligent System Company

In the last six years, Publicis has truly become a partner in its clients’ transformation. Through three strategic bets – putting data and technology at the centre 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 organisation 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.  

An ambition that is already a reality

Concretely, Publicis is infusing a layer of AI across its platform 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 unrivalled 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, 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 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 optimisation will deliver new levels of accuracy and outcomes positioning clients to win at commerce sooner and faster. 

- Creative + Production: Personalised content will finally be realised 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 licences, 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.