“We’re going to be more precise. Our producers will rapidly produce content personalized for micro audiences and fit for platforms using AI-assisted production tools – we’re going to do things we’ve never done before,” she added.
The vision and potential impact of CoreAI
As it alters the speed at which people work across the company, Publicis will need to refigure how it operates, including how it values its services and charges clients accordingly.
Sadoun believes that the speed of operations, especially within the media space, will make its offer more competitive to clients but denies it being an efficiency play, claiming it to be a route where Publicis can support its clients to grow faster in a way its competitors currently do not.
Serrano added that clients were already asking for more content at a faster pace and that the business would like to focus more on outcome-based deliverables and performance within media, something that will become the norm across the industry.
One key ambition in creating CoreAI is that it will operate without bias, being trained through the inclusion of diverse and representative data.
Serrano admits that is a difficult task to set, which is why they are using frameworks and including what she describes as the inclusion of “almost a DEI training model” to ensure representation within the results.
She also explained that another level of governance is being introduced through frameworks that will to focus on bias within the creative output of the platform, something that has been in development for the last couple of years.
This was recently tested through the company’s annual New Year’s Wishes campaign, which saw it release personalized gen AI content for each of its 10,000 employees. Serrano admitted that the comedic training model needed work to “tone down” some of the toilet humor it offered up.
“There’s a lot of us that are interested in working on the basis that if we are to live in an AI-led paradigm then wouldn’t it be great to create one that is better than the one that we have, which is biased while living in a patriarchal system … That’s just legacy. So we’re very focused on that,” she continued.
In June, Publicis became the first advertising holding company to join The Coalition of Content Provenance Authenticity, a joint development foundation project that aims to unite tech and media organizations to set standards around content authentication.
Creativity remains core
Ultimately, Publicis’ roots remain within the creative sector, a legacy not lost on Sadoun, who denies any interest in becoming a technology or AI business. He quotes founder Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet’s belief that creativity remains the same while everything else changes.
