Publicis Groupe invests $326 million in AI, including new tool that will transform its workflow

Publicis Groupe is doubling down on AI with a $326 million investment over the next three years and a proprietary tool it says will completely innovate its disciplines in creative, media, software, operations and insights. The agency holding company also said its organic revenue grew 6.3% in 2023, outpacing its October forecast. Pubicis made it clear just how seriously it is taking AI by releasing an hour-long video featuring top executives—CEO Arthur Sadoun, Chief Strategy Officer Carla Serrano, Chief Solutions Officer Sam Levine Archer, Publicis Media CEO Dave Penski and Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz—introducing the new CoreAI tool to investors, clients and employees. Sadoun said the creation of CoreAI moves Publicis from a platform to an “intelligent system company.” The AI tool combines Publicis’ proprietary data, including consumer data across 2.3 billion profiles of people globally and trillions of data points about content, media and business performance, and almost a petabyte of assets that exist on its current AI program Marcel, all combined with data and coding owned by Publicis Sapient. Recent news: Publicis used AI to create 100,000 employee videos During the CoreAI video, Publicis executives claim that its innovations set it apart from other holding companies. “These capabilities we’ve built in-house provide us with the tools and assets to deliver AI faster and better,” Vaz said. “This is a level that most of our tech competitors can't match, and no holding companies are even in this conversation.” The speakers break down how CoreAI works and offer examples of how it can be used. For example, it demonstrates how employees will be able to use CoreAI to break down a brief. After uploading it as a PDF, the tool locates information on market moves, market trends and customer motivations that are immediately automated onto the platform. A process that would normally take weeks could now take seconds, Archer said in the video presentation. Employees will have an AI assistant that can help them make real-time changes to a client’s marketing plan—they can ask questions to the tool and receive responses. Penski showed an example of a media planner asking the chat function in CoreAI a question such as “how much do I need to spend to move 40,000 vehicles this year?” for work on an automotive client. The tool can also alert media planners to issues related to a campaign, allowing the planner to swap out AI-generated assets and change the messaging of certain ads within seconds. Creatives will be able to access AI insights and create personalized content at scale, software engineers can automate their work process and the system can enable staffers to find potential team members to work on an RFP. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Impact on jobs and billable hours CoreAI was built last year and will be gradually rolled out in the first half of 2024. Publicis Sapient led the development along with help from other companies within the organization. Publicis will invest 100 million euros in 2024 on AI, with half of that dedicated to hiring and training talent, and half dedicated to implementing new tech through licenses, IT software and cloud infrastructure. The investment will be fully funded by “internal efficiencies” and have no impact on operating margin in 2024, and should be “slightly accretive” to its operating margin in 2025, Publicis stated. Serrano admitted that jobs will be affected, but didn’t forecast job cuts as a result of this new way of working. “[Jobs] will definitely be affected, but they will change,” Serrano said. “For example … we used to have illustrators that would make storyboards as we’re selling an idea. AI does a much better job at that. However, we never used to have prompt engineers. Now we need prompt engineers. So what’s happening is either people are getting upskilled or their jobs are changing.” As the AI will speed up workflows, Serrano said it will likely shift the billable hours structure now standard in the advertising industry. Currently, Publicis has a mix of billable hours and projects that are outcomes-based, with compensation based upon results. “I do think that the paradigm will shift,” Serrano said. “We're talking much more about outcomes-based compensation, and I do think deliverables are going to matter, because [clients] are going to want more. Whether or not that’s more media plans to get to more micro-segments, that means more content to put out in the world and to switch out and what have you. So we're definitely seeing our clients already starting to have those conversations.” Ad Age Best Places to Work 2024 50 companies doing a standout job See the full list here Organic revenue gains, years of planning Publicis also released some details of its 2023 results two weeks before its Feb. 8 earnings report. Organic revenue grew 6.3% in 2023, higher than the 5.5% to 6% prediction it had made in October, with 5.7% organic revenue growth in the fourth quarter. One-third of the holding company’s revenue came from data and tech, fueled by its 45,000 engineers, IT consultants and data experts, Sadoun said. “I do think that we believed in AI earlier than others, which is what we were mocked for because we knew the technology was coming,” Sadoun added. Publicis introduced its Power of One model in 2015; built its employee operating platform, Marcel, in 2017; and acquired Epsilon in 2019. From 2023: Publicis claps back at Marcel critics in Cannes “We launched Marcel because we thought that if you are living in Shanghai and you are a young creative executive and you want to participate in the next Super Bowl in the U.S., we can give you this opportunity, thanks to our platform,” he said. These moves led to the creation of CoreAI, which could essentially change how Publicis operates. Marcel houses some of Publicis’s other AI tools. “What we are doing here is exactly the same [as Marcel], but bigger and in every kind of discipline,” Sadoun said. “We’ve been lucky because we were not expecting this to be what is going to be the future of our industry. But we knew we had the need.” And when Publicis bought Epsilon “we did not know that there would be some cookie implications, but we knew that personalization was the future.” Even though the new AI tool has limitations, Vaz admitted, it will continue to change as more data gets added and the technology improves. And when it comes to clients, “CMOs have come to understand that the test and fail is actually a winning strategy,” Serrano said. “The technology at that time was not ready for the ambition that we had,” Vaz said of Publicis’ earlier investments. Even today, “our ambition is much bigger than what the technology right now will allow us to do,” he said. “It’s going to allow us to do a lot more than yesterday, but I think tomorrow it’s going to allow us to do a lot more than today.” AI marketing blog How brands are using ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and other tools Read more here

Publicis Groupe invests $326 million in AI, including new tool that will transform its workflow

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