Omnicom is a New York-based marketing and communications organization. They supply media planning, consumer relationship management, and brand advertising services to over 5,000 clients in over 70 countries.
Omnicom introduced Omni, an internal operating system, in 2018 to facilitate the development of data-driven marketing campaigns in its agencies. Employees can identify personalized consumer experiences, develop audiences, and optimize project outputs with the aid of the platform.
What Issue Were They Trying to Resolve?
Operating system Omni is made possible by a huge dataset consisting of over 14 petabytes of information regarding various marketing audiences. But Omnicom’s VP and chief technologist Paolo Yuvienco says it might be tough for the ordinary worker to make good use of massive amounts of data.
“You’d be able to see a bunch of different demographic information about [an] audience,” Yuvienco explained. Users of Omni could, for instance, gain access to data regarding the websites that a particular demographic group visits. “Frankly, you needed to be somewhat of a subject matter expert to interpret that and then derive the right insight from that,” according to him.
Omnicom tried to integrate artificial intelligence functionalities into the Omni operating system to promote innovation and enhance the company-wide application of data-driven decision-making.
Main Personnel and Collaborators:
Microsoft and Omnicom formed a partnership in late January 2023. It followed Disney as the second organization to obtain access to the most recent OpenAI GPT models through Azure, the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft.
AI Used:
Omni Assist, a GenAI virtual assistant integrated into the Omni operating system, was developed by Omnicom. According to Yuvienco, working with Microsoft and obtaining early access to the most recent GPT models were critical for Omnicom because they enabled the company to “build out some prototypes very quickly” and “fail fast.”
Omni Assist uses Omnicom’s data, which is what sets it apart from other AI chatbots like OpenAI’s free one. “We incorporated the large language models and pointed it to this vast ecosystem of data,” Yuvienco explained. He further stated that this enabled the surfacing of insights using “a very natural human-like interface.”
Yuvienco illustrated what the use of generative AI has enabled the organization to accomplish. “You can say, okay, for this campaign against this audience, identify five influencers that would be interesting to use for this campaign, and give me a preliminary budget split, if I had $100,000, to spend against those influencers.”
Yuvienco further stated that although this type of insight-surfacing was present in Omni even before the integration of generative AI, it now enables users to analyze and extrapolate data at a much faster pace. “What it does is that it gives our people a much further down the line starting point on the journey that they need to go through to drive those outcomes,” according to him.
Does It Work?
Yuvienco stated that the project underwent eight months of exhaustive prototyping. Omni Assist transitioned from the “client and user alpha stage” earlier this year to the “closed beta stage.” Its implementation among a limited number of Omnicom agencies and consumers has begun.
“We want to make sure that we get it right the first time out, and [we want to] cost control because it’s still quite expensive to utilize the type of processing that’s necessary to get to the outcomes we’re looking to drive,” Yuvienco stated. “Once it reaches a certain critical mass, it will take off and become the norm,” he continued.
An indicator by which Omnicom evaluates the effectiveness of generative AI is the duration required to finish particular tasks. “We are not at the point where we eliminate the time needed to perform a specific task because we still need a significant amount of human intervention, but what we are doing is cutting that time down,” Yuvienco stated.
What Is Next?
Omnicom and Getty Images announced a partnership in November in which Omni Assist would be designed to generate “commercially safe and legally indemnified” images through the integration of a generative AI image tool. The organization also employs the image generation model Imagen and Google’s Vertex AI platform.
Yuvienco stated, “I think we’re at a point now where we can start tweaking and finding the perfect balance between humans and machines that’s going to be transformational for not just our industry but for every industry.”
