Publicis Groupe launched an artificial intelligence platform which helps to source the best people internally to work on its client briefs.

This platform has been named as Marcel  after Publicis Groupe founder Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet. It is almost a reality with some elements now live, with clients including Walmart, having already beta tested the platform.

At first look this platform seems a bit like using Siri,  the aim is that it will have access to the working details of all 80,000 employees within the network to consider when choosing the best people to service a project. And that it will learn about their abilities as they work on projects and develop a better understanding of them over time.

In the unveiling, Sadoun, the chairman and CEO of Publicis is joined by chief strategy officer Carla Serranto, and the recently appointed group creative chief, Nick Law. The enigmatic Frenchman is full of vigour and energy while talking about his pet project.

“It is time for our industry to face facts – the holding company model has been totally frozen for last 20 years while everything around us has been changing – it’s time to break the industry – to reinvent it with our clients and reinvent it with our people,” is his explanation for why he chose to take what is clearly a gamble on developing the platform at all. He declares that Marcel has been created to “break the barriers” that still exist between creativity, data and technology within the advertising sector.

In a bid to explain the potential of the product, Serranto reveals the phrase “Me to the power of 80,000”, which will clearly be how clients are sold its functionality, offering them access to the skillset of the network. Nonetheless it is later explained that marketers will still hire agency brands and work within them, rather than across the full group. That necessary silo remains in order to protect client confidentiality.

“We want to connect our people to reinvent our people with the way we work and with this we will draw a line in the sand,” Sadouns declares, determined to underline his belief that Marcel will help his staff achieve more and addressing the nervousness previously expressed internally.

And while the development is very much a part of Sadoun’s ‘client first’ vision that has seemingly revitalised Publicis in recent years, he states that Marcel is all about the people working within the company; “We want to put people first in our transformation… give staff freedom to work as they live and connect 80,000 creative minds…that has been incredibly difficult journey.”

The features that Marcel possess are encompassed within four sections, each prefixed with the words ‘The Power of…’ in their titles and concluded by ‘Opportunity’, ‘Connectivity’, ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Productivity’.

The ‘Connectivity’ section is where the ‘Expert Match’ feature is housed, able to search through applicants from across the relevant agency brand who have expressed an interest through the Open Brief feature within ‘Opportunity’ and who best matches the needed skillset. This has already borne fruit in beta, with a test Walmart brief from February having discovered a creative team from Spain who ended up attending the Academy Awards, which the brief was focused around. Law reveals that 70 creatives from around the globe were involved in the process before the successful team was chosen.

“Marcel is a connector. The measure of success is the simple, the only thing that matters is to find the best people who have the best ideas and to attract the new generation of creative minds,” states Sadoun. “We are shifting from being a communications partner to being about transformation. We need to make sure that everyone in this company has an opportunity to learn to transform itself.”

From the reveal, taking place at Viva Tech in Paris as promised last year, more work will be implemented by Microsoft, which was appointed to build the platform earlier this year, with 1,000 staff internally being sought to be involved in testing the platform, set to go live date in January 2019.

There are still many questions to be answered, and while Marcel has been unveiled, there is a lot of work to do before it is implemented permanently by Publicis Groupe. And interestingly, Sadoun hopes it will help the company better understand itself, with an AI that is free of emotion helping source the best people who opt in for each-and-every job.

“Marcel will be able to show the gaps,” he predicts. “I want to believe that when it comes to the opportunity for people to do more things,” he adds.

With the heady expectations, it perhaps just as well that Marcel hasn’t yet learned to feel pressure or anxiety, as the industry waits to see if it can truly deliver the transformation its company so desires for its clients.