Publicis Groupe did not conclude any significant agreements or any agreements conferring a significant obligation or commitment on the Groupe, with the exception of those concluded in the normal course of business, during the two years preceding the date of this Universal Registration Document.
The Groupe does not believe that it is dependent on any specific patent or license to operate its businesses.
R&D within Publicis Groupe has always taken an applied form, as it is directly linked to the search for concrete technological solutions designed to help our clients, to developing and improving the performance of our products, technological platforms or internal tools, and to taking advantage of the latest technological advances to offer new options to our clients. Several PhD students work within the Groupe, most of them at Sapient and Epsilon.
At Epsilon, more than 70 PhD students in decision science are continuously optimizing the algorithms of our platforms to make them more precise, more powerful, and ultimately, more effective. A specific program hosts 15 PhD students for one year to monitor the work of the Decision Science teams. Every year, Epsilon organizes an internal hackathon and an internal Tech conference, intended to mobilize all their engineers in a short time to work on very specific technical topics - in recent years around the integration of AI in PeopleCloud. The solutions resulting from these sessions are tested, verified and then deployed to be rapidly operational for clients.
Publicis Sapient has developed seven “Labs” in North America, Europe, India and Latin America, which are centers of technical expertise to respond in real time to clients’ technological issues. Our experts are available to answer client questions regarding the implementation of different platforms and the search for optimal solutions, and these teams can conduct Research & Development projects on behalf of clients to improve the performance of their tools or develop a new application environment (interconnection architecture, website, app, internal network). Two approaches enable the Groupe’s internal engineering community to work more effectively together. On the one hand, thanks to an internal collaboration platform several teams of engineers can cooperate simultaneously on the same project. On the other hand, it is an agnostic solution for the cloud, artificial intelligence/machine learning projects bring together engineers and data scientists in order to gain efficiency and speed for large-scale solutions for clients. With the influence of AI and Generative AI, Publicis Sapient’s expertise in this area is an asset in terms of innovation for clients, on how to use these new tools to improve products, services and user experiences. The skills spectrum of these teams covers Data Science, Data Strategy, Data Engineering and Data Analytics, which are partners in AI Accelerators and AI Labs, thus enabling rapid experimentation with new solutions. These teams also include computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, mathematics, physics and engineering specialists.
Lastly, the Groupe’s Media activities invest significant resources in mathematical and statistical processing in order to best advise their clients in their media choices (particularly in terms of modelling the marketing mix or calculating the effectiveness of media actions), and many doctoral students are also part of these teams.
