Bloomberg: Impact of Generative AI on Economic Growth

ANCHOR Edward Ludlow, Bloomberg

Well, let's bring in Publicis Sapient CEO, Nigel Vaz. Your job is to work with technologists at all kinds of firms, banks, quick-serve restaurants, to digitally transform. You tell us how AI is deflationary.

Nigel Vaz

- Our belief right now is that when you think about the ability for businesses to serve customers in lower cost, more efficient ways, AI is a huge accelerant to what they're trying to do, which means they achieve growth with lower costs, and efficiency and productivity. Pretty much every western economy today is suffering from population challenges, people dropping out of the workforce.

The hospitality sector in particular has been particularly hurt. So lots of check-in lines, orders heard incorrectly. AI is helping with the work we're doing to start to make these simple, basic consumer experiences easier, more effective, and, frankly, more efficient for these businesses. So, to us, I feel like that is a real opportunity to drive some of that growth at a lower cost.

ANCHOR Edward Ludlow, Bloomberg

Where do you sit in the debate around whether AI will eliminate jobs versus sort of being supportive of existing roles?

Nigel Vaz

Well, you know, there's some research by David Artur talking about the fact that since 1940 we've now seen, you know, 60% to 80% of jobs not exist today. And a lot of those jobs have been created by technologies that have come over the course of that period. When we think about AI, of course there are going to be some jobs that are impacted and governments and public-private partnerships, the kind of work we do to bring in new skills and capabilities from younger people entering the workforce into this technology is going to need to happen to continue to build skills. But we also think this is going be a huge opportunity for growth. We recently acquired fully Publicis Sapient AI Labs, a joint venture we created a few years ago, because we feel like that's going to help us bring in more people into the workforce, into this new space. If you think about GDP, you know, Goldman Sachs is talking about 7%. The National Bureau of Economic Research is talking about 14% in terms of impact on worker productivity. I think all of these things will create opportunities.

ANCHOR Caroline Hyde, Bloomberg

Yeah, Nigel, you just mentioned how you're training, well, the future workforce. What about the workforce of the here and the now? Do the C-suite, do the people below them, have the skillset to be adopting all the joys and risks of generative AI in the here and now?

Nigel Vaz

I don't think anybody was expecting the adoption of this technology to happen as quickly as it has, right? But what it does tell you, the fact that you have so many people engaging with this, making this one of the fastest-adopted technologies, is the potential is certainly there. With that come risks, management of ethics, understanding bias, all of the issues that have to be worked through.

But our belief is certainly now a lot of the existential threat that's being talked about AI, we're not in a place right now where that is in the immediate future. I think there are bigger issues in the immediate future in the context of AI, like how do you ensure that bias and things that brands wouldn't want associated with them, you know, hallucinations, all of these ideas getting addressed today and companies are making investments very, very quickly, because the benefits on the other side are huge.

You know, we're seeing molecule identification in pharmaceuticals, we're seeing fraud detection in banking. We're seeing risk management and risk assessments for mortgages. All of these things now starting to be able to happen so much more seamlessly than was possible before.

ANCHOR Caroline Hyde, Bloomberg

Nigel, I'm kind of fascinated, just the intricacies of exactly what you go and do. You set up a meeting with a company who's new to you. What do you go in and say? How do you start to assess the need of each individual company, where they're currently at, because ML and AI is already in our life, and then what they need to do to start to ensure that they're getting all the benefits of productivity?

Nigel Vaz

You know, Publicis Sapient is fundamentally in the business of digital business transformation, right? Effectively, very simply what that means is helping businesses that were established transform themselves to be increasingly digital in a world that is fast becoming entirely digital.

So, our approach centers around this notion of this idea called SPEED. It is an acronym and an idea about helping businesses move quickly. And one of the biggest challenges with enterprise businesses is the CO would ask for a strategy and a business case and then that would turn into requirements and then they'd linearly pass that baton onto the next rung and the next rung. So, for us, the S in SPEED is strategy.

So being really clear about what use case you're trying to drive, the outcome from assessing that, and then moving very quickly to this idea of P, which is product. So not thinking about the business in the context of a project that begins and ends, but a product that is constantly evolving.

The E is experience. So how do you think about the experience of the employee and the experience of the customer, the patient, the citizen that you're trying to affect. The next E is engineering, which is all about how do you build these experiences in ways that allow you to evolve ever so quickly? And then the D is data & AI. So how do you create that closed loop system, almost like fingers on a hand where the data feeds back into helping you automate and build the efficiency we're talking about. And that conversation today in many organizations is about, yeah, we've got this and this and this but they don't work like fingers in a hand. You know, it's a strong thumb and a strong index finger, but they don't connect to the pinky. And guess what? It becomes very hard to lift and shift and move things in that context.

ANCHOR Edward Ludlow, Bloomberg

Nigel, for what it's worth, a headline crossing the Bloomberg Terminal from BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, who's speaking at BlackRock's Investor Day. He says AI may be the tech that brings down inflation. When Nigel Vaz goes into a company like that, be it Walmart, JP Morgan, Marriott, do you want the CEO sitting on the other side of the table from you to implement this change with AI? Or do you want the CTO? Who's leading the charge within these companies?

Nigel Vaz

I think this is a business change and of course you need a very strong CTO, CBO, somebody who understands how the technology works. But for us, AI is an opportunity to reimagine the business. So you know, the Bloomberg, you know, Terminal headline that you were just calling out there, our belief is that doesn't happen when it's a CMO or a CIO or a CBO. This has got to be something that is a CEO priority. And from all of the CEOs I'm spending time with from some of the biggest companies in the world, I can tell you this is the one technology that they themselves have started to realize will force the choice for them to be more transformative rather than digitizing what they already do, which has been the first wave of digital, I think, thus far.

ANCHOR Edward Ludlow, Bloomberg

Publicis Sapient CEO, Nigel Vaz. Great to have some time with you.