The Scene
It’s been 10 years since Publicis, the French advertising giant, shook the industry with its $3.7 billion acquisition of digital consultancy Sapient, and six years since it appointed Nigel Vaz to run the combined Publicis Sapient. The division now generates 15% of the group’s revenues and employs one in five of its 100,000 people.
Vaz, a former internet entrepreneur, has sought to focus his business on digital transformation, combining technology and human talent to guide clients through the artificial intelligence era. It’s a moment of exponential change, he says, and most people respond poorly to such rapid upheaval. The way for CEOs to make the most of AI, he argues, is to get their data in order; keep testing what’s working and what’s not; and value the employees who can “learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
At its earnings this week, Publicis said Vaz’s business was down mid-single digits last quarter because of cautious customers’ “wait-and-see attitude” to capital expenditure. But CEO Arthur Sadoun predicted it would return to significant growth because “every one of our clients will need to transform their business model with the help of AI.”
Vaz is a fast talker and a fast listener; he has trained himself to consume audiobooks at up to six times the normal speed. He dubs his methodology “SPEED,” for strategy, product, experience, engineering, and data and AI.
This interview has been edited for clarity — and speed.
The View From Nigel Vaz
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: How are your clients thinking about AI-driven transformation?
Nigel Vaz: Today, there isn’t a single transformation where clients are not thinking about how they’re going to leverage AI. I liken this moment to the 1990s, when every CEO was asking, ‘What is this internet thing? We know it’s interesting. We know it’s going to have an impact on our business.’ The difference is, back then, there was a lot of skepticism. I think there’s broader recognition now that this is a moment to reimagine very fundamentally how you are doing what you do.
What’s your advice to the AI laggards?
The problem with the wait-and-see approach is you’re not focused on things that you need to be doing. Anytime somebody says to me, ‘Could you bring your team in to help us do an AI strategy?’ — the first thing I ask is, ‘Is your data in the right order so that it can have AI built on top of it?’ You can start doing that, even if you don’t want to get into the debate on whether you should be using DeepSeek or OpenAI or Gemini.
People feel like there’s so much change, we’ll just wait and see. And our advice to them is you’ve got to test and learn through this process. It’s a bit like the early days of the internet. You may not know exactly what’s going to happen on your website, but if you don’t have one at all, you will never figure it out.
How has this technology wave changed the task of leading a company?
The biggest shift this time around is that the rate of change and the scale of change has been growing exponentially. Most people are good with linear change, but we react poorly to anything exponential in nature, like volcanoes, tumors, and pandemics. I’m fundamentally a tech optimist. And I feel like people will evolve if organizations set up the construct and the investments for them to do so. If you believe in this idea that you value people because of their ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn, and you establish that as the mechanism that you’re rewarding, it’s a real accelerant to the future.
What’s been the biggest decision you’ve had to take in this process?
The choice we had to make is being very clear that we don’t believe an entirely AI world without people is anywhere in our future, in the near term. At the same time, saying that we simply have the best talent and the best engineers — who are going to operate in our model in the most traditional sense — isn’t, either.
So the idea here was to create a frame for our people to be able to learn, unlearn, and relearn, and get excited about solving some of these new problems from a technological perspective and a people perspective. It’s essentially an Iron Man model: Invest in the suit and invest in your people, and you put them together and you get a superhero.