Publicis.Sapient and Lucid Announce Strategic Partnership to Accelerate the Development and Application of Artificial Intelligence for Marketing and Business Transformation

Today, Publicis.Sapient, part of Publicis Groupe, and Lucid, the leading firm in the commercial application of artificial intelligence (AI), announced a strategic partnership, with Publicis.Sapient making an investment in Lucid. Together, the organizations will leverage the world’s most comprehensive and advanced AI platform, Cyc, to help clients transform data into actionable insights that enable them to better navigate and capitalize on the opportunities created by today’s digitally disrupted environment. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Built into the Cyc enterprise AI platform are more than 30 years of knowledge and millions of PhD hours. As part of the agreement, Publicis.Sapient is launching an AI practice that will deliver services and applications using the Cyc platform, giving clients access to the leading AI technologies that the U.S. government and other organizations have used to address some of the world’s most complicated problems.

Estimates by industry analysts suggest that the market for these business applications and services employing AI could reach $260 billion by 2018i. The partnership also allows Lucid to continue to improve and scale its vertical AI offerings in financial services, energy and healthcare, and marks Lucid’s entry into the development of marketing-­‐specific solutions, where it can leverage its cross-­‐ industry learnings to help a broader range of clients.

"Across industries, our clients are grappling with increasingly complex business environments created by a digitally disrupted world. To compete effectively, they must harness and make sense of multiple, previously undetectable or unintelligible, data sources. Through our partnership with Lucid, we can deploy transformational solutions to uniquely enable our clients to analyze and glean insights from data to gain a competitive advantage,” said Alan Herrick, CEO of Publicis.Sapient. "In particular, the new suite of marketing intelligence services expands our ability to capitalize on the explosion of consumer data to improve marketing performance while at the same time providing customer insights to guide business transformation efforts.”

Cyc’s deep learning capabilities differentiate it from other AI offerings with its ability to share why it arrives at an answer, which helps organizations solve issues faster and smarter.

"We are thrilled to welcome Publicis.Sapient as a strategic partner and investor," said Michael Stewart, founder and CEO of Lucid. "We initially began working with them because of their significant client relationships across the financial services, energy and healthcare industries, which align with Lucid’s focus, as well as their tremendous expertise in marketing services. Together, we can help transform the way companies use AI to conduct business and improve the way our services impact the market at large.”

Publicis.Sapient will initially focus on four key areas as part of the AI practice:

• Marketing Services: Publicis.Sapient will introduce a new set of marketing intelligence services leveraging the Cyc AI technology to help clients revitalize a wide range of critical marketing strategies and activities, including optimizing and automating media buying, initiating more impactful targeted marketing campaigns, and improving the overall development, packaging, pricing and promotion of products and offerings. 
• Financial Services: Ranging from equity research to arbitrage, Publicis.Sapient will take advantage of Lucid’s ability to sift through, analyze and derive insights from multiple data sources to help financial services firms gain competitive advantage.
• Healthcare: Building on Cyc’s work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to help cure cancer, Publicis.Sapient will work with healthcare organizations to apply AI technology to improve patient care, detect fraud, and accelerate research.
• Energy: Enabling companies to recover and generate energy safely, Publicis.Sapient will build on Lucid’s advanced AI capabilities that help organizations mitigate risks and identify commercial opportunities across the energy value chain.

Examples of Cyc’s AI capabilities include:

• Financial Institution: Since 2008, financial institutions have been struggling to meet increasing regulatory requirements and the top 20 banks alone have faced fines of more than $235 billion. A global bank used Cyc to create the foundation for a compliance investigation application that helped protect the bank from potential regulatory penalties and market cap hits.
• Oil Company: Using Cyc, an application was developed for a global oil company, which significantly increased yields on all deep-­‐water platforms, specifically reducing the need for expensive, unnecessary shutdowns and saving equipment from damage with earlier detection and analysis of acute, chronic conditions.
• Cardiothoracic Medical Center: An application based on Cyc reduced clinical researchers time to identify and examine cohort populations before clinical trials from 2-­‐4 weeks to only 2-­‐4 minutes.

i Technavio, Gartner