Publicis Groupe has launched an incubator to test the types of services its artificial-intelligence platform, Marcel, will offer brands.

M Labs, which was launched internally last month, is already working with its first brand partner to find the best way to gather teams to work on a big transformation brief.

Publicis Groupe announced in June that it was cutting its entire marketing budget for 12 months to fund the AI-powered platform, which it hopes will transform the way its people work. 

Carla Serrano, chief strategy officer at Publicis Groupe and chief executive of Publicis New York, said there are certain features the group "absolutely knows [it’s] going to create", such as a "knowledge-sharing platform that gets tagged and learns with AI".

M Labs will test additional services at the same time as the core platform is being built. Serrano said this is to ensure Publicis Groupe is "developing the right features", by checking that they work and employees like them.

Publicis Groupe will formally launch Marcel at its VivaTech conference next June, but Serrano said she hopes to be able to share "a few beta tests" from M Labs before then, either later this year or in early 2018.