PARIS, FRANCE: Publicis Groupe, the world’s third-largest advertising and media company, announced its ambitious plan to become the industry’s first AI-powered Intelligent System, after achieving a stellar organic growth of +6.3% in 2023, outperforming its peers for the fourth consecutive year.

The group will invest 300 million euros over the next three years to build CoreAI, a unified AI-led foundation that will connect its enterprise knowledge and data across its platform organization. The investment will be equally split between people and technology, with a focus on upskilling, training, recruitment, licenses, IT software and cloud infrastructure.

The investment in AI of 100 million euros in 2024 will be fully funded by internal efficiencies and will not affect the group’s operating margin, which is expected to increase slightly in 2025.

Publicis Groupe, which has transformed from a holding company to a platform in the last six years, through three strategic bets – acquiring Sapient and Epsilon, implementing a country model, and building a single operational backbone – aims to leverage its AI capabilities to become a true partner in its clients’ transformation.

CoreAI, which is being developed in-house by Publicis Sapient, the group’s digital business transformation arm, will integrate 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.

The group’s AI-powered collaboration platform, all combined with 35 years of business transformation data and coding owned exclusively by Publicis Sapient.

Publicis Groupe will showcase its CoreAI capabilities at Viva Tech 2024, the world’s largest tech event, in May. The group expects to roll out CoreAI iteratively in the first half of 2024, starting with the second half of 2023.

Arthur Sadoun, CEO & Chairman of 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 organization 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.

Putting CoreAI at the heart of our organization 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.

As we enter our second century, we are confident that all of the efforts we have made to transform and the ongoing investment we are making in our people and technology will allow Publicis to continue to outperform its peers on organic growth, sustain the highest financial KPIs, and lead the change in our industry.”