CEO Nigel Vaz on Publicis Sapient's digital transformation gambit

12 December 2023 Consultancy.uk

Nigel Vaz has been the global CEO of digital business transformation company Publicis Sapient since 2019 – and serves as the multinational Publicis Groupe’s global lead of digital business transformation. He tells Consultancy.uk how Publicis Sapient has evolved to help clients get the most from digital tools, data and AI in the post-pandemic world.

Nigel, it’s been three years since we last spoke. You have been the global CEO since 2019, and your consultancy’s focus had just begun shifting to digital business transformation. In the time since then, how have you continued to evolve Publicis Sapient?

The shift we made to a singular focus on digital business transformation in 2019 changed the trajectory of Publicis Sapient and resulted in some of the best years in our history – including double-digit growth in 2021 and 2022. The strategy enabled us to accelerate growth in key geographies, improve overall business growth and increase our organisational resilience.

CEO Nigel Vaz on Publicis Sapient's digital transformation gambit

The thesis that underpinned the strategy was that digital business transformation – and transforming large enterprises for a digital age – was going to be a long-term trend. That idea was stress-tested by the arrival of Covid-19 at the start of 2020, which changed the world in so many ways. Our strategy stood the test and in fact what we witnessed was an even stronger imperative for every CEO to embrace digital business transformation – to enable new digital products and services in order to create value, drive growth and build sustainable businesses.

The period during and since the pandemic has been volatile, with growing macroeconomic headwinds and geopolitical instability. One of the key aspects to our growth has been to ensure we are never complacent about previous successes. To that end, Publicis Sapient has been making strategic acquisitions, expanding our geographic footprint and evolving our capabilities in the pivotal technologies, including generative AI and cloud, that will drive and underpin the next digital business transformation wave.

The changes we have made since 2019 have helped to build a foundation for Publicis Sapient’s long-term growth as the pre-eminent digital business transformation partner for our clients. In the period since, we have partnered with new large enterprises in financial services, retail, telco, health and the public sectors. For clients such as Marriott, Lloyds Banking Group, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Nissan, we’re driving significant business outcomes through digital business transformation and, in turn, accelerating our own growth. 

How have you evolved your own thinking and how you operate as a business leader over that same period?

In 2020, during a period of restricted international business travel for us all, I was able to commit more time to a long-planned project and write the book on digital business transformation. Published in January 2021, ‘Digital Business Transformation: How Established Companies Sustain Competitive Advantage From Now to Next’, is intended as a framework for business leaders as they navigate transformation journeys, but also acts as a guide for Publicis Sapient’s people to connect the company strategy and their own impact.

One of the aspects of the book I’m most proud of is its exposition of SPEED capabilities: Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering, Data and AI. These are the fundamental capabilities that our clients need to build on to evolve as companies capable of continually identifying and creating value. They are also the connected capabilities we have invested in at Publicis Sapient, as part of our own transformation.

These past few years have seen a period of extreme flux in how businesses operate – not least the where, when and how people work. As a leader, it’s important that I adopt the behaviours that I advise for our clients – namely to be willing to continually unlearn and relearn. I have never doubted the potential of rapid and large-scale change to challenge conventional business assumptions, nor the ability of disrupted organisations to pivot and adopt new ways of working by harnessing technology. One advantage to that has been that, when circumstances called for flexibility in thinking and approach, I was better equipped to lead the necessary operational change.

Today, digital business transformation, our connected SPEED capabilities and shared purpose ‘to help people thrive in the brave pursuit of next’, help unite and guide Publicis Sapient’s teams globally. At the same time, my, and our orientation has shifted to build in flexibility for our people. When people want to work in a distributed fashion in a digital environment, our aim is to enable an employee-driven hybrid solution that creates opportunities for people to connect with their teams and colleagues both through physical locations and remote connectivity.

You mentioned a series of strategic acquisitions that Publicis Sapient has made over the last 18 months. Can you talk us through Publicis Sapient’s rationale for its acquisition strategy?

One of Publicis Sapient’s core values has always been to partner for client impact, and this emphasis also informs our acquisition strategy. We look for opportunities that will extend our digital business transformation capabilities and offer significant expansion of our global distributed delivery model. In turn, that offers the possibility to expand the geographies in which we operate and build new nearshore delivery opportunities that allow us to better serve clients. Our approach is to pursue acquisitions where they improve our offer to clients globally while serving our strategy for scale and sustainable growth.

In 2022, we acquired Tremend, one of the largest independent software engineering companies in central and eastern Europe, that created a new global delivery centre for Publicis Sapient, and Changi Consulting, a cloud solutions company and top Salesforce partner in the MENA region. Since the beginning of 2023, we’ve made four strategic acquisitions, including Salesforce consultancy Tquila ANZ, Latin America technology company Practica, Publicis Sapient AI Labs and leading Adobe partner Corra.

I’ll elaborate on Practica as an example as we recently welcomed Practia’s 1,200 person team into Publicis Sapient. Latin America is one of the world’s fastest-growing regions for digital business transformation. It’s a region we targeted for expansion and it also creates a nearshore delivery platform that will allow us to better serve our clients in North America. Now we have global delivery centres in India, Eastern Europe and LATAM.

CEOs today cite AI as the top disruptive technology impacting industries. How does the acquisition of Publicis Sapient AI Labs accelerate your generative AI offerings and add value to Publicis Sapient’s clients?

Publicis Sapient has long had AI and machine learning capabilities as part of the wider suite of digital business transformation capabilities that we bring to clients. We’ve always been clear that digital business transformation is not about digitising parts of a business, but instead is a holistic approach to changing the way an organisation thinks, organises, operates and behaves. Advances in generative AI are part of the broader transformation picture: in order to remain competitive, companies will have to adapt and integrate generative AI into every part of their operation.

The logic for acquiring the full stake in Publicis Sapient AI Labs – an innovative research and development incubator – is to enhance our existing data and AI capabilities and enable our clients to harness the power of the data and technology through new AI models to drive dramatic improvements in business performance and create new digital products, services and experiences.

With organisations worldwide exploring the transformative potential of generative AI, Publicis Sapient AI Labs will provide our clients with multiple opportunities to transform their businesses. These include identifying and unlocking value pools enabled by AI; building prototypes and rapid proof of value for business use cases; training programs spanning prompt engineering to large language model development; and collaborations with our alliance partners, including Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

Finally, what one piece of advice would you give to business leaders in order to navigate the challenging macroeconomic environment we’re living in?

Digital is the biggest deflationary force there is to help businesses drive more growth at lower costs, get products and services out to market faster and create more efficiency in how they operate.

Now, more than ever, is the time for organisations to construct the capabilities to identify and realise value through digital. Against a backdrop of macroeconomic pressures, established businesses need help to balance the pressure to perform in the current environment with the need to transform in the context of a changing digital world.

Business leaders would be well advised to focus on improvements in five capability areas. Advanced together, these will enable your company to repeatedly develop products and services that achieve product-market fit – where it is able to create products that customers want to buy, has identified the audience that wants to buy them, and has designed a business model which compels that audience to buy your product.

These are the SPEED capabilities:

  • Strategy: developing and testing the hypothesis based on priority value pools
  • Product: evolving at pace and scale
  • Experience: enabling value for customers
  • Engineering: delivering on the promise, at pace and at scale
  • Data: validating the hypotheses and uncovering insights for constant iteration
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