Publicis' AI Leap: A New Century of Creative Disruption

PARIS – December 04, 2025

As Publicis Groupe approaches its 100th anniversary in 2026, the global communications giant is not just looking back at its storied past; it's aggressively scripting its future. The latest chapter comes in the form of its annual 'Wishes' film, a centenary special titled 'A Lion Never Gives Up.' But this is no ordinary corporate retrospective. By blending live-action footage with cutting-edge generative AI, Publicis is offering a powerful statement on its own resilience and a vivid preview of an advertising industry on the brink of a technological revolution.

The film, which chronicles the company's journey from a small Paris shop to a global powerhouse, is a technical marvel. It's a hybrid creation where history is not just retold, but reconstituted. This project signals a strategic pivot, positioning AI not as a mere tool, but as a core component of creative expression and business transformation.

A Lion That Learns: Reanimating History with AI

The 'A Lion Never Gives Up' film, produced by the group's founding agency Publicis Conseil, is a masterclass in modern storytelling. While a quarter of the film uses traditional live-action, the remaining 75% is a tapestry woven by artificial intelligence. Drawing from a vast archive of 4,500 photos, films, and documents, the AI doesn't just upscale old footage; it generates entirely new 2D and 3D scenes, bringing pivotal moments from the company's past to life with stunning clarity.

This process required a new kind of creative team, with AI prompt artists and AI archivists working in tandem to source, catalogue, and direct the algorithms. The result is a fluid editing process where, unlike traditional production pipelines, any shot could be regenerated from scratch, offering unprecedented creative flexibility. This move is emblematic of the company's ethos. As Chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun noted, "It is this spirit of resilience that has defined us for 100 years and that is captured in our Wishes: a lion never gives up."

The film itself becomes a metaphor for the company's journey—surviving wars, fires, economic crises, and now, leading the charge through a technological upheaval. Sadoun frames the next era starkly: "2026 will also be the year where we enter our second century, the beginning of which will undoubtedly be defined by the rise of AI." The film serves as both a celebration of a century of human ingenuity and a bold declaration of intent for the next one.

Beyond the Film: The CoreAI Engine and Strategic Alliances

While the centenary film is the public face of Publicis' AI ambitions, the real workhorse is operating behind the scenes. The company is in the midst of a massive €300 million, three-year investment into its proprietary platform, CoreAI. This isn't just another software tool; it's being engineered as the central nervous system of the entire organization, designed to transform Publicis into a fully "intelligent system."

CoreAI is built to unify the group's massive troves of proprietary data, including profiles on 2.3 billion consumers, and apply intelligence across every facet of the business. From hyper-optimizing media buying to generating business intelligence for marketing strategy and enabling the creation of personalized content at an unprecedented scale, the platform is set to redefine operational efficiency.

To supercharge these capabilities, Publicis has forged critical alliances with tech giants. An expanded partnership with Adobe will embed Firefly generative AI models directly into CoreAI, streamlining the production of images, vectors, and video. Simultaneously, its digital transformation arm, Publicis Sapient, is building an Enterprise AI Transformation Center of Excellence with NVIDIA, leveraging the chipmaker's powerful infrastructure to guide clients in their own AI adoption journeys. This strategy indicates that Publicis is not just using AI for its own creative output, but is also positioning itself as a key consultant for other businesses navigating this complex transition.

An Industry-Wide Arms Race for AI Dominance

Publicis is not innovating in a vacuum. Its aggressive push into AI is part of a broader, high-stakes arms race among the world's largest advertising holding companies. Each is vying for a competitive edge in a market being fundamentally reshaped by artificial intelligence.

WPP, a chief rival, has committed over $300 million annually to its AI framework, WPP Open, which integrates AI into its creative and media workflows. It has also partnered with NVIDIA to launch Production Studio, an AI-enabled application built on the Omniverse platform to automate large-scale content creation. Similarly, Interpublic Group (IPG) is integrating Adobe’s GenStudio with its own Acxiom data platform, part of a $100 million investment to automate and scale creative content. Dentsu and Havas are making parallel nine-figure investments, developing their own AI-powered operating systems—Merkury and Converged.AI, respectively—to fuse data, creative, and media.

This industry-wide pivot underscores a seismic shift. The battleground is no longer just about creative ideas or media buying power; it's about who can build the most intelligent, efficient, and integrated system to deliver personalized marketing at scale.

Rewriting the Agency Playbook: The Human-AI Equation

The implications of this AI infusion are profound, rewriting the decades-old advertising agency playbook. The most immediate impact is on efficiency. Generative AI can shrink campaign timelines from months to minutes. A Publicis case study in Slovenia, for instance, showed that using AI technology doubled creative productivity and cut production times in half. At a macro level, this could unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in marketing productivity annually.

This radical efficiency, however, raises urgent questions about the future of work. Forecasts from firms like Forrester have predicted that automation could eliminate a significant percentage of traditional agency jobs. Yet, leaders like Arthur Sadoun are championing a different narrative. "This film is a human, historical and technological odyssey, that blends our best creative minds with our unmatched capabilities in AI production to embody our belief that the future of AI is our people," he stated.

This vision reframes AI as an augmentation tool, not a replacement. The goal is to automate repetitive tasks, freeing human talent to focus on higher-level strategy, ideation, and client relationships. Publicis is backing this vision by dedicating half of its 2024 AI budget to training and recruitment, cultivating an "AI-ready workforce." New roles like the AI prompt artists on the centenary film are emerging, requiring a blend of creative intuition and technical skill.

This evolution also forces a reckoning with the agency business model. The traditional model, based on billable hours, is threatened by AI's ability to reduce time and manpower. Agencies are now under pressure to shift towards value-driven or outcome-based pricing, where compensation is tied to the results they deliver, not the hours they log. As Publicis and its rivals race to integrate AI, they are not just adopting a new technology; they are fundamentally redefining their value proposition, betting that the synthesis of human creativity and machine intelligence will be the key to thriving in the next century of business.