Publicis is buying into the AI hype—literally

Publicis Sapient has fully acquired Publicis Sapient AI Labs, it announced this week, marking the latest development in the growing hype around generative AI within the marketing industry.

Publicis Sapient, a subsidiary of the advertising and PR giant Publicis, originally founded Publicis Sapient AI Labs in 2020 as a joint venture with consulting groups Elder Research and Tquila, which will no longer retain stakes in the company following the acquisition. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

It plans to use the AI arm to provide client services such as training programs for large language model (LLM) development, creating prototypes for business use cases, and collaborating with the likes of Microsoft and Google to train LLMs, the company said.

Nigel Vaz, Publicis Sapient CEO, told Marketing Brew that AI Labs could help clients across industries such as healthcare, automotive, and finance. For instance, within the financial services industry, he said AI has been used for years to help with things like fraud identification.

“This is now taking it one step further and basically saying, ‘Can we actually use automated decisioning to start to use the bank’s own data about those customers to figure out what might be the next set of relevant products, in a way that we might not have connected the dots otherwise prior to the application of large language models in the context of that particular space?’”

Trendy

Publicis has made other forays into AI in the past, including a partnership with Microsoft in 2018 to support AI platform Marcel.

The advertising conglomerate is not the first marketing group to invest in AI, following interest in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and competitors like Bing AI Chat and Google Bard. Omnicom announced in April it was partnering with Adobe, using its generative AI tools Adobe Firefly and Adobe Sensei GenAI to “help Omnicom agencies meet growing content demands as clients look to provide a larger quantity and variety of personalized content to customers,” according to a press release.

Besides agencies like Publicis and Omnicom buying into the AI explosion, Stagwell has recently made several AI investments, such as in the PR company PRophet, which allows users to upload a pitch into AI and have it personalized. Stagwell also built the AI-powered SaaS asset management platform SmartAssets, which analyzes and categorizes a brand’s creative library and provides performance reporting data. Meanwhile, Google is exploring using AI to help power its advertising business.

“Generative AI is a hot topic everywhere,” Vaz told us.