Publicis flexes AI muscles, rolls out 300 mn Euros investment over 3 years

Six years after shifting from a platform, Publicis Groupe is putting AI at its core to become the industry’s first Intelligent System. 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.

Concretely, Publicis is infusing a layer of AI across its platform organization to connect its enterprise knowledge under one entity: CoreAI.

Publicis plans to invest 300 million euros over the next three years as it becomes a true Intelligent System. For 2024 alone, the group anticipates an investment of 100 million euros, with 50% on people, focused on upskilling, training and recruitment, and 50% on technology, through licenses, IT software and cloud infrastructure. The investment in AI of 100 million euros in 2024 will be fully funded by internal efficiencies. It will have no dilutive impact on Groupe’s Operating margin in 2024 and it will be slightly accretive on Operating margin in 2025.

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.

The group is building this unifying AI-led foundation in-house and across its full enterprise on the back of 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 center 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 5 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 optimization will deliver new levels of accuracy and outcomes positioning clients to win at commerce sooner and faster.

Creative + Production: Personalised content will finally be realized 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.

Arthur Sadoun, CEO & Chairman, Publicis Groupe, commented, “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. The platform organisation we have built over the last decade, our proprietary data of unmatched breadth and accuracy, and the 45,000 engineers, consultants and data analysts at the heart of our model, uniquely position us to push the boundaries even further by leveraging AI.”

He further said, “Putting CoreAI at the heart of our organisation and truly becoming an Intelligent System company will make our people more efficient and more productive. But way more importantly, it will allow everyone to do things tomorrow that no one can do today, guided by the highest ethical standards, and at the service of our clients’ growth.”