Publicis Groupe invests heavily in AI capabilities

Already calling itself a “platform,” agency holding company Publicis Groupe will evolve into an “intelligent system” through a 300 million Euro investment in AI capabilities. This builds on the boosting of its digital commerce and data competencies through the acquisitions of Sapient and Epsilon.

CoreAI will be the over-arching name for the capabilities Publicis plans to layer across its offerings. It will unify data from 2.3 billion consumer profiles and trillions of digital actions as well as the assets in Publicis’s existing AI platform Marcel.

Why we care. Given that Marcel.ai was launched in 2018, before the excitement over generative AI, this might be seen as a way to elevate a project that was already underway. Nevertheless, the announced investment is significant.

What is really eye-catching, though, is to see a very large holding company on a multi-year journey to become, in essence, a technology company. With Omnicom making moves to raise its digital game, there’s an interesting trend here, arguably paralleling the way in which consultancies like Accenture and Merkle have done so much to bring tech capabilities in-house.

What CoreAI will do. The new AI layer will initially address five core areas:

• Media planning, buying and optimization.
• Business intelligence to support marketing strategy.
• Personalized content creation at scale.
• Publicis Groupe operations and client management.
• Rapid deployment of digital and software products.

Dig deeper: Omnicom’s Flywheel acquisition signals the start of a revolution