VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Good afternoon, good evening, good morning to everybody who wherever you're watching from. Thank you so much for joining us today. Today I'm joined by my esteemed colleagues. I'll start with whoever I see on my screen first, Rishabh Yadav, who's the Global Technology Lead within marketing and advertisement and experience at AWS and then followed by Vishnu Gugla who is part of public safety and sits within our marketing transformation. Go-to-market and strategy leader, both those are based out of North America. I'm in London, so hence I said good morning, good afternoon, good evening. So just to give you a bit of context in terms of what the webinar will cover today, today we're talking about what it takes to build a content supply chain and how AI automation are helping marketers move from backlog to breakthrough, to break through. And that's the overall subject matter. We've given ourselves a little bit of a guidance in terms of some of the questions that we'll be answering today. We'll be looking at what's driving the pressure on creative and content teams today. How are brands rethinking content production just for scale and why is automation no longer a nice to have? And you will hear from Prashant and Vishnu on a different perspective from AWS side and from publicist sapien how we are addressing these concerns at the moment. The format today is a bit of like a round table so you know us three will be discussed keeping it very fluid and discussing these topics. So I'll dive right in again thank you for joining so I'll start by Maybe to Prashant, reinventing the supply chain. Could you give us a view of what are the biggest workflow bottlenecks currently in art?

Yeah, thank you, Fifi. I think the biggest bottlenecks that we are seeing in terms of the creative workflows, I would say those would be the quality assurance and approval process workflows and also compliance workflows. These workflows are manual usually and they take up to multiple working days to up to a week. And we're seeing a lot of automation over there, especially with the use of AI where we are reducing these timelines. Rants from multiple weeks and days to minutes and up to a day and many times.

Ambition from public-as-sapient perspective would be great to hear like how we addressing this with our clients.

Yeah, sure. And thank you, Fifi and Prashant. Good to be doing this with you. I think that there's a couple of things when we look at the observation around what's going on with content. If we just take one step back, right, there's been two forces that have been going on, you know, some a little bit longer, right? Like if you think about just the promise of personalization, right, in a world where we're seeing so much content. How do you actually deliver that relevance and effectiveness of that message to your end consumers? And that takes a lot of effort today, right? Most content supply chains, if you just think about how content is produced, is a fairly manual process. There's a lot of handoffs, right? Our clients do a lot of the strategy. They may have an agency or an in-house team that's actually producing the content. There's a third. team that actually puts that content out for consumption, whether it's on the web, on social channels. So there is a lot of handoffs that are happening and the handoffs are not just from one place to another, but there's also an iterative loop that happens, right, as it goes from one stage to another, right. And for us, I think that there is a lot of efficiency to be gained when we look at that entire business process end to end. and start to say where can you actually take those iterative loops up? How can you actually produce content that is on target? talking to the audience that you want to talk to. And in all of those cases, you feel like AI has made a huge difference where it can learn from all of the past and be able to produce something that's of higher quality and on target very quickly, right? So I think that that's how we're seeing a lot of the, you know, if you take the step back from a process perspective, where are the efficiencies to be gained? And then how do you actually address them with the right application of of technology and AI to deliver that.

Prashant anything to add to that maybe from the investor's perspective as well actually obviously you have a lot of interaction from any clients as well so be good to get your point of view

I totally agree with the points stated by Vishnu. And from infrastructure point of view, I think there are critical pressures on the creative team right now. And we have seen one of the biggest challenge that we are seeing right now is the sheer demand volume. The scale is massive right now. Initially, as Vishnu mentioned, the creative teams are being asked to generate exponentially more content personalized for every single. not every if not every single individual to every single segment and audiences for different channels different sizes so that is causing these bottlenecks as well to what Krishna said so

I guess the natural next step question I want to ask is how can AI agents, I guess, accelerate like what you said, maybe even on the QA side, on the approval side, publishing compliance that you mentioned earlier, Prashant?

Yep. So we have a number of AWS services like Amazon Bedrock and recognition which we can utilize to automate creative compliance validation that traditionally took days and now we can bring it down to minutes and not days. Agents can intelligently route content through approval workflows. No one has manually has to manually look at those every single creative and those approval workflows could be triggered using AI workflows. perform real-time quality checks as the creatives are being generated and deployed and even generate comprehensive test scenarios where these creatives could be tested against certain test scenarios created by AI agents based on the marketing brief that has been created. And this isn't just faster, it's more consistent and reliable than manual process as well.

And Vishnu, how open are people to AI agents? I guess that's the big, is there still a lot of resistance to that?

I don't think that I wouldn't use the word resistance. I probably I think that there is a lot of discovery that's going on. Right. Part of it is actually driven by just the pace of innovation that we're seeing. Right. Like even if you take the last two years, we didn't talk about agents in 2024 right now or not at least at the scale at which we're talking right now. We were still in a very much a gen AI conversation at that point. Right. So I think that. For a lot of our clients that we see, they're unsure as to. Should they be jumping onto the journey now? Does that exclude them from the next innovation that's coming out? So I think that I would say that it's a little bit more of an inertia and, you know, in a lot of cases is like, am I jumping in too early? Is this the right one to jump into? Is something else that's going to come in next that is going to supersede all of the investments that I'm trying to make right now? So I think that what we're seeing is. As a result of that, we see a lot of experimentation that's going on, but that's not scaling to enterprise level rollouts of using this thing consistently, right? So that's a little bit of a trend that we're seeing, but it's also the, you know, the obviously the other side of it is there is also a fear of losing out from a competitive perspective. If your competitor is actually jumping onto this, then how do you sit and wait because they are going to be able to produce, as Prashant said, much faster, much more efficiently and a lot more precise because there is very, once the machines learn, they are very codified in the way that they actually go through the process. So it's a lot more efficient and accurate. So I think that those are the two things that most of our clients are struggling with. with us to, you know, how do I get in? When do I get in? And what should I be doing right now to set myself up for the future?

I guess it's a really hard thing to balance between do I want to jump in and invest and do what Prashant said like it's constantly changing so if I don't jump in and invest will I get left behind so I guess that that's that's a a difficult balance to maybe do and maybe that's what's why some organizations are holding back is there an example that you've seen where it's you know maybe one of the one side of the business is very willing to go all ahead in and then one side isn't is there maybe good to talk through what we're seeing in the market some examples that maybe audience would want to learn from

I think that, like I said, I think that the result that we're seeing in the marketplace is a lot more experimentation than scaling at this point, right? So everyone's jumping in, right? It is just to the extent to which they're committing to it or scaling, right? Because I think that with the tools that we have, the wonderful tools on the AWS stack and just the general innovation that we're seeing in the market around AI. AI agents and everything else, there is a lot of promise on what this can deliver, right? So we're seeing it being, you know, in a multi-brand scenario, we're seeing a few of the progressive brands actually just saying, all right, let's jump in, we're going to try and get something out of this thing and learn along the way. Whereas there's some others that may be a little bit more traditional to say, okay, we may just. They just use it for content generation because that is the most obvious and easiest use case to do it. But they're not rethinking their entire process. So they're trying to address a part of the process as their experimentation or their hesitance to scale that. But we're seeing all sorts of flavors. Everyone's adopting, right? But to what extent and how committed are they to scaling it is where we're seeing a huge variation in our. than our clients.

And do you think that's coupled with like brand awareness and governance has a part to, you know, like a part to play with the while increasing output or?

Yes,

One of the ones.

there is. Yes, there is. And that varies quite a bit by industries, right? Like when you look at retail or consumer products, they're obviously the brand means a lot to them, the product means a lot to them, right? Like in the level of accuracy that they want and staying within their brand guidelines is much higher than, you know, some of the other industries that you may see. see right especially when you've got people and products being and versus if you take an energy company which has maybe a picture of the pipelines or windmills right the the threshold that you have for the tolerance of what the AI produces versus doesn't you know produce varies quite a bit right so yes everyone thinks about the brand it's not like anyone's going to put something out there that is that is not on brand and it's not on the tone of what the brands want but I think that because depending on the industry that you're in and how the brand how critical the brand is and how it's portrayed I think that the the tolerance for how well that the the AI produced content needs to be on point just varies quite a bit

And Prishant, are you seeing the same from an AWS perspective in terms of the industry cut that we're seeing talked about?

Yes, we are also seeing a lot of experimentation around this. And I think one of the key decision points should be the return on investment, which use case brings you the right return on investment. And I personally feel that content supply chain is the right use case for AI automation. complete overhauled in my opinion and in terms of brand governance I think it gets down to choosing the right services and having the right implementation in place the key is building intelligence into your governance system rather than relying on those manuals checkpoints so I feel that AI does a better job here where you have certain guardrails already defined and it is taking care of all that governance and brand keeping brand intact and with With AWS AI services, we can create automated brand governance that maintains your standards while enabling a speed. So you can think of it having a most experienced brand manager reviewing every piece of content around the clock as you're building it. So I feel it is here to help, but we will see more and more experiments turning into production workflow.

I'm staying on the same track. How does AWS security compliance framework support enterprise grade creative AI?

Sure. So security is at the foundation of everything that we build at AWS. AWS provides enterprise-grade security that's trusted by government agencies, financial organizations, healthcare organizations. So we are known to offer comprehensive compliance frameworks, sophisticated identity management systems, and complete data governance services. So this means that the companies can innovate with confidence knowing their creative assets and processes are protected and at the same time they have the power to use the most sensitive workloads or run the most sensitive workloads in the world on powered by AWS.

Now moving on to the human and machine partnership, I guess. How does automation, I guess, augment augmentation not replace creative talent? How does it add to it? I guess I, how do I not lose my job?

Now, I think that, again, there's a couple of things that I see, right, like, you know, along with being partners with our friends at AWS and using a lot of their technologies, right, we're also part of the biggest media communications agency in the world, right. And so what we have is an inherent knowledge of what it takes for us to produce something that is of quality. from a creative perspective right and what are the workflows where are the efficiencies so there's a lot of inherent knowledge that we bring around because I work with 80,000 other people that are in this business and they are our colleagues right so there's two things that we are seeing in it One is, is it going to cause disruption? The answer is absolutely yes. But disruption does not equal displacement. And I think that that is a very key thing that we have to see, right? And again, like I said, we come from a world where we know marketing inside out. Everyone's gone through a transition. They used to do storyboards and sketches on paper. They then used the likes of, you know, computer software to be able to do

that.

to be able to do that with CGI and such. And I think that this is just another evolution. So that means that you're going to be disrupted in the way that you're going to work, but that does not quite equal displacement. Now, is that going to be a one in zero game? Absolutely not, right? But I think that there is a lot more hype than the reality of it, because I think at the end of the day, you still need the humans to have the right prompts to generate the right kind of images, right? Right. Just because I have a tool, it doesn't mean that I can be creative. I certainly cannot be. I can speak from personal experience, you know, so there is there is an art to it that you still need to teach the machines. Right. So I think that that's what I mean by disruption is you've got to think about how you. ask something to generate a picture or a video or whatever the case may be differently than you used to do it with other tools that you used up until now.

So there's still a need for Don Drapers in the world, but they will be more polished and politically correct and come with a lot more knowledge base than stories.

Yes, there is absolutely an intuition in marketing that is not going to go away, right? And even if you're able to look and take all the great technology that AWS has and be able to slice and dice customer data in certain ways. The intuition of how you want to market and what you want to say to somebody is still a very human thing to do. And that's why I keep saying, you know, it is a different way of working because I think that it's also, you know, the effectiveness of what goes on, what you actually produce is also going to be very different than what you did before, just because there's so much of the mundane and the manual tasks. you know one had to do that are now taken over by machines so you're truly focusing on the creativity part of it I

And because Vishnu, you have such a good insight into Publix's group as well and what we do outside of Publix's Sapien. So what new roles or skills will emerge, I guess, in marketing operations side as well?

think that you will see this is It's only my personal opinion on it and my observations, obviously, right? I think that you see, you know, the true art and science coming together, what you see from a creative perspective is, you know, them gravitating a little bit more towards actually the science of it, right? And when I say the science, it's not the actual algorithms, right? Like it is how do you understand and work with machines very differently and how do you talk to them differently and learn how to write like writing a prompt. prompt you know the output of AI is going to be dependent on how well you write the prompt right like so you refine your skills on that language and that lexicon versus you know your creative way in which you could draw a line or whatever right so I think that that's where I see a lot of the changes right looking at data because now you have so much more data to look at and being able to actually glean the insights from that data in a human way, it's a very different skill set than when you were told, oh, just market to a 35-year-old in this region, right? So there's a lot more preciseness in it, which means that you also have to

have a different way of interacting with that information.

Jean, by you saying from an AWS perspective, any kind of new roles and skills? I remember, you know, like 20 years ago, half the tech roles didn't even exist. So in the last five years, have you seen anything new that's become very normal? Now

So we have been hearing a lot of that lately, but let me start by saying that in my personal opinion, I feel that automation is no longer nice to have. Automation is moving from optimization to survival. And if there are companies that are going to stick with manual workflows, they cannot keep pace with market demands and opportunities. So it's a must have in today's world. And I think our approach should be about amplifying. requiring human creativity and not replacing it with where we let AI handle the routine repetitive task as Vishnu mentioned, like compliance check and workflows or set versioning and QA around these assets and workflow routing and let the humans do the creative work or the work that they are best at like a strategy or innovation and breakthrough creative work and in terms of roles I think we will see the emergence of AI augmented creatives and in near time and professional who understands both creative excellence as well as AI capabilities. So if I have to call out some roles, I would say AI workflow architects would be a role that we'll probably see in near future.

I'll be telling all our kids to do this. No. Yeah. I don't have any involved. I tell the kids.

Well, I think the key skill is to learn to collaborate with AI systems and achieve outcomes.

So just moving on from maybe looking at some particular use cases, Vishnu, if you could share anything around BODI and AWS customer story, you know, if there's a good use case you can share like proof in action, I guess.

There are several use cases and again I think that one of the things that we focus on when we when we're advising clients is to take a step back from the hype and just to think about what is the end goal that they're trying to reach right and I'll talk about I can't obviously name clients but I'll talk about three very specific use cases that we are seeing across a few clients of ours. Right. The first one is for, like I said, anyone who's been in marketing and doing this is acid reuse is a huge issue for a lot of our clients. The reason is if you look at the traditional way in which we stored assets, right, especially in dams. It was mostly optimized for faceted search. So you thought about the channel that you worked on, you may have a slightly descriptive version of a campaign, but you never stored assets with the type of rich metadata that you can have to say what is it describing? What was the campaign about? Was the mountains in the background? Was it a shot on the beach? And with some of the technologies that Prashant just talked about for AI. What we are able to do is now be able to decompose those assets and have much richer metadata. So what it's allowing our clients to do is they don't have to remember the exact campaign or the channel, right? They can... interact with the data in a much more natural way and that allows them to be able to find assets very easily and then actually reuse it right and it's and we're seeing metrics that are you know like 70% of reuse and such that we're seeing in clients that are actually using this technology really smartly the second use case is obviously content generation there is enough models out there you know this there's there's lots of them that are using that for generating the content and the third one which is what Prashant actually alluded to a couple of times right which is the compliance checks right and the back and forth that really happens from a compliance perspective when a human's doing this versus when AI generates it it knows the rules to which it needs to actually generate and also the checking becomes easier because it is actually much more rule-based in doing that so So those are some of the big use cases that we're seeing, right? But there's lots of clients who are doing one or two of those things, depending on what their end business KPIs are. There's some that are doing all three of them, but that's what we're seeing from a market trend perspective.

And from an AWS perspective, looking at like SageMaker, Bedrock, how is like the AWS infrastructure? affecting scalability.

Yeah, so what Vishnu just shared perfectly illustrated by AWS infrastructure is essential for creative AI at scale. And not just infrastructure, but AI is essential for complete complete content supply chain and creatives. So we can reduce significant cycle time reduction because of the services like SageMaker and RedRock that provide scalable secure foundation for building solutions that deliver these at scale. So when our customers need to process thousands of assets for a campaign launch, our infrastructure automatically scales. So that's the power of AWS combined together with the possibilities that Publicis Sapient has created. So that's my take on that.

Okay thank you for that we're coming towards the end of our discussion so I just wanted to take the next five minutes and maybe share some of our key takeaways from our discussion today. Prashant I don't know if there's anything around the infrastructure advantage that you could maybe around that or anything else you would like to share.

I think what we have discussed today really comes down to the power of two AWS and publicist sapien working together to deliver truly agented content supply chains and more. So this isn't just about cloud services or consulting. It's about combining AWS secure, scalable infrastructure with publicist sapien's deep creative expertise to build intelligent and autonomous workflows that would transform the content and smoothen the whole journey for the... our customers together.

I wish you the, I guess, please share your thoughts and anything around the practical part that you've mentioned.

Yeah, no, I think, you know, I think that we've had an amazing partnership out here with the tools and the technologies that we're seeing and the expertise that we're bringing. I think that there's a couple of things that we advise our clients on. I kind of feel like there is a little bit of... a focus on the means rather than the end right we're very focused on the tooling right but the tooling and I think this is where the partnership works really well is we know how to use those tools very effectively and they're great tools and the innovation that the AWS is driving right but when we combine it with our focus on the outcomes the kinds of experience that we bring whether it's from a horizontal perspective like marketing or even within an industry industry what does it mean because pharma marketing is very different than cpg marketing i think that you know where we are seeing a lot of success is when clients are listening to us about what is the end goal that you're trying to reach because as i said in one of the earlier comments that i made i think technology is changing really really quickly right but if you have the right foundation then this is like you know we we spent a lot of time thinking about body and building it as a complement to AWS technologies is to lay that foundation so as things change you're still able to stay on course to where you're going from your your goals perspective because the technology is going to change that is going to continue to change really really quickly right so that's some of the things that we're talking to our clients about and making sure that we are staying on the course even though the means to that that end keep changing with us

Yeah, and for me it's the same. So reinforcing like the AI for marketing is far safe that it's human centered. And I guess also Power of Three. So like, you know, when I sit in obviously our alliance team and like alliance BD roles, so when you're educating the client to say if there is any hesitation or if they're concerned about everything, you know, partnership with AWS, with us, and it's like using the Power of Three, why don't we do some explanation together to demystify any kind of resistance or any concerns they may have. when you know it's the way forward and that might open like I guess reassure some of the people who are resistant but it's a journey that everybody needs to go on so it's going to make us you know better in what we say and I guess like free up our quality time to do creative more creative things you know and leave the mundane jobs to AI that's what it's there for well thank you very much for joining today I really appreciate Okay, both of your time, great conversation and thank you for all the audience joining. Thank you, bye.

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