Why Publicis Groupe Is Investing €300m into Its AI Ambitions

“In reality, it isn’t creativity that evolves; it stays the same. It’s everything else around it that grows.” 

The immortal words of Publicis founder Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet couldn’t be more relevant today as the holding company announces its ambitious artificial intelligence plans. The fundamental value of creativity remains steadfast as ever - but is everything else around it growing? Oh boy - is it ever.

This morning the Groupe revealed a massive €300 million investment into AI over the next three years while also detailing the company’s comprehensive new AI strategy and system, CoreAI, which will transform five key areas of the business: insight, media, creative + production, software and operations.

The announcement comes as the holding company also announced strong 2023 financial results, with organic growth of 6.3%, beating expectations and outperforming the rest of the industry for the fourth year in a row.

For Carla Serrano, chief strategy officer for Publicis Groupe and CEO of Publicis New York, and Scott Hagedorn, global chief solutions architect, the launch represents an exciting new era for the Groupe. From allowing strategists to become data analysts, with up-to-date insights at their fingertips, to empowering producers to create automated layouts and greater personalisation of creative assets and taking the drudgery out of repetitive reporting, briefing and RFP tasks, the business has high hopes for what this AI-powered platform will achieve.

This isn’t the first time that Publicis Groupe has engaged with AI to fundamentally reorganise and transform itself. Back in 2017, the Groupe announced that it would be pausing all award entries for the year in order to fund the creation of Marcel, an AI-driven personnel platform, created in partnership with Microsoft. Since then, its audacious move has borne fruit, with its organic growth in 2023 outperforming the industry for the fourth year in a row. And, notably, the leadership accredited Marcel with steering the Groupe through covid-19 lockdowns in an efficient and connected way, which allowed it to protect 2000 jobs. 

The past six years has seen the Groupe invest heavily in what it calls ‘three strategic bets’ - using data and technology as its foundation thanks to Sapient and Epsilon, restructuring around a country model and creating a single ‘operational spine’. All of that, the team says, has transformed Publicis Groupe into a ‘platform’ and an ‘intelligent system company’. 

Currently the team is working with an alpha version of the CoreAI platform, with limited functionalities, and a beta version is due to launch in May. It’s the product of a very busy year indeed - the decision to create this CoreAI was taken, says Carla, early last year, building upon the pre-existing internal platforms Marcel and Bodhi. 

“So, this was all in the making. But, as we looked at our AI strategy moving forward early last year, that’s really when we looked at our assets and said, we’re in a fantastic position. We’ve got proprietary data, we’ve got a platform model that’s already integrated. So this isn’t about siloed, automation capabilities, so we could really supercharge the entire enterprise," she says.

Carla describes the whole AI strategy as ‘human-first’, and so in order to make sure that what they were building would be truly useful, they turned to the humans of Publicis Groupe. “We did this the way a normal client would; we hired Sapient, and Sapient went discipline by discipline, audited the major tasks, interviewed different levels of people within that capability, that business unit to get a sense, interviewed clients… This was a huge undertaking,” she says. “It was an accelerated timeframe, as you can imagine, with Arthur [Sadoun, CEO of Publicis Groupe] as the client.”

It’s worth emphasising that Publicis Groupe has built its CoreAI internally, rather than just licensing something off-the-shelf. But that shouldn’t be a surprise. “That’s what happens when you have a technology company embedded in your company and you’ve spent $8 billion in data and consulting and tech!” laughs Carla. “I always think about it as, everyone has equal access to AI but very few people can master and leverage it.”

Indeed Publicis Groupe’s recent history of not only working with AI but building AI goes deep. It worked with Nvidia to design the very chips that were used to train the ubiquitous AI platform ChatGPT. (In the launch presentation, Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz lays down the gauntlet with: “This is a level that most of our tech competitors can’t match and no holding companies are even in this conversation.”)

It’s not just the tech architecture that’s ownable - the Groupe argues that another unique selling point is the vast array of data that it has thanks to the acquisition of Epsilon back in 2019. It says that gives it access to 2.3 billion people profiles, allowing real-time insights. That consumer data will be combined with a library of millions of creative assets and 35 years of business transformation data to allow its people to work more quickly and better informed. 

In the launch presentation video, there's a demonstration of how a strategist could use the platform to generate real-time data and insights on a live client case. Scott explains the breakthrough behind it, "Sapient has been building, for the last two years, a platform called Bodhi. It's integrated together with ChatGPT, and we have a kind of private ChatGPT sandbox. We were able to take the Epsilon datasets, essentially, and bring them into that environment and to build a large language model around the data that we have," he says.

Publicis Groupe has committed to invest that aforementioned €300 million. The first €100 million will be invested in 2024, split evenly between investment in people (upskilling, training and recruitment) and tech. This €100 million will be funded by efficiencies created using Marcel and the Groupe’s agile structure - indeed in the launch presentation Arthur claims that that investment will ‘have no dilutive effect on our operating margin in 2024’ and will be ‘slightly accretive in 2025’.

That prediction is fuelled by the efficiencies, speed and accuracy the leadership believes CoreAI will deliver, as Carla explains. “We’re in a very good position, as you know, in terms of when you think about our year end. It’s not a small feat that we’re delivering 6.3% [growth] when everyone thought we’d get 5.9%. We do think that for 2024 it’s about getting CoreAI up and running, making sure that we can start to pilot it, and get people across all the business units to be using it, which is why we feel bullish that by 2025, these things that we’re already starting to use now are just going to get exponentially more efficient.”

Moreover, there's no doubt in Carla's mind that Publicis Groupe's willingness to demonstrate its digital and business transformation skills on itself has drummed up business. It is selling clients tailored versions of AI and, since the launch of Wishes, it has had numerous clients ask for something similar for their customers. Will CoreAI and the 'intelligent system' business model do the same?

"There's this term in the tech world called 'dog fooding' which is: you've got to eat your own dog food before you go out and sell it. And I really think that from Marcel on, we've always taken an inside-out approach. Let's do it for ourselves," says Carla.

So, the leadership are convinced that their AI strategy is going to boost the bottom line over time, but what’s it going to mean for Publicis Groupe’s creative output? The promise of personalisation at scale combined with generative AI video was brought to life with the Groupe’s ambitious 2024 Wishes project. The launch presentation demonstrates how producers will be able to auto-generate layouts and tailored versions of assets and how creatives will be able to collaborate in real time with a tool called GenCanvas. And while that’s undoubtedly a major consequence of joined up AI across data, creative, production and media, the impact on creative, Carla says, is so much bigger.

“People with real creative talent have really looked at AI as a supercharger tool… I do think that we’re going to enter into a new era where we’re actually pushing boundaries of creative like we haven’t seen before because this tool is freaking amazing,” says Carla, who explains that by taking care of the low level, irritating tasks, AI will clear a path for creatives to focus on big thinking. “I do think that ideas, more than ever, are going to have a currency because, let’s be honest, the low level version of creativity, the machine can do. And it’s going to do it faster, it’s going to do it cheaper. But the breakthrough stuff is still going to require human ingenuity. I would say that the creative business is really psyched about this.”

Scott suggests that creatives will likely find the AI shaping itself to their working style. “Working on the insights AI, I’ve found that it’s been iteratively responding to how I query and how I build audiences and I could see with the creatives that they can be training their own AI to be an extension of each individual creative - which would be mind-blowingly cool,” he says, before joking, “An AI-based Andy Bird extension or Andy Bird plugin!” (Andy is founder of the Publicis Groupe collective Le Truc.)

No one among the Groupe’s leadership is claiming that this strategy will be easy to implement or that they won’t make mistakes along the way. But they’ve identified two challenging areas in particular that they’re keen to address upfront.

On  inevitable worry that efficiencies brought about by AI will lead to a reduction in jobs, the team is keen to address that upfront. Although the launch presentation acknowledges that there will be operational efficiencies to be found, in both the presentation and later in the conversation with Carla and Scott say the focus is very much on using AI to allow their people to deliver more. That’s something underlined by the 50m investment in upskilling, training and recruitment.

Scott explains, “Some companies are looking at AI strictly from an efficiency perspective, but others that are more progressive are thinking about how you augment your actual employees to make them better and able to do more. Interestingly, data science and the ability to join up big datasets has been a bit of a choke point in the industry at large, because there aren’t enough of them. What we hope to do is liberate a lot more of the data power, better strategies, more insights faster.”

Ethics and confidentiality are also a huge priority for the Groupe. To that end, it says that the ethical principles and policies around privacy, fairness, transparency, security, accountability and such that it has developed to go further than the minimum required by government legislation, to ensure that it doesn’t have a negative impact on society and consumers. Client data and IP will be protected too. It is rolling out training and compliance mechanisms across the Groupe - and in order to ensure that their creative doesn’t end up replicating bias, it is using diverse and representative data sets to train its AIs.

The protocols are built on the ethics framework that Sapient has been using in recent years, and it will continue to evolve. But Carla suggests that AI ethics oversight may well emerge as a key new role. “I think one of the new jobs that’s going to come out of AI, within our organisation anyway, will probably be an ethics taskforce that’s specific to how we’re training the models, how we’re doing governance before it reaches the public domain,” she says. As an example of the granularity and nuance that ethical and sensitive AI-generated creative requires, she highlights a joke from the Wishes project. In some videos CEO Arthus Sadoun reveals a personalised tattoo - but in some parts of the world that could cause offence, so you have to think really carefully about how you train your model.

On privacy Scott explains that a particular approach is emerging. “Because we run an industry-leading data practice, we take data privacy really seriously around the globe. We have a specific audit office for doing that. But in terms of where we’re going to be going with our clients, I think they’re going to want, essentially, their own sandboxes.”

Seeking to lead in a constantly evolving space means that, inevitably, there will be more challenges along the way, some that only become apparent as they get hands on with the work. Carla refers to the ‘battle wounds’ from the constant creative tweaking and re-concepting that was required for the Wishes project, for example. But with their focus on education, ethics and privacy they’re building a strong foundation.

This is likely to be a transformational journey that eclipses even Marcel and the Groupe’s famous ‘Power of One’ restructure and, while it appears to have a head start on many of its competitors from the advertising and consultancy spaces, this is still early days. However, as the holding company readies itself for its 100th anniversary in 2026, it clearly has its sights set firmly on the future.

“We do believe that we’re in a position to continue to outpace the industry, the category, the business, the industry we’re in,” says Carla. "We think that AI has the potential for us to leapfrog. I feel like we’ve left the ‘holding company’ moniker a little bit and we’re inching towards where we’ve always wanted to be, which is a category of one that sits between marketing transformation and business transformation. With CoreAI and with the vision that we have, that just crystallises that further. Maybe at some point, we stop comparing us to the hold cos altogether because we’re shaped so differently, we work so differently and our clients understand that we sit between two or three different categories.”