Good morning, and thanks for being here, and for those of you attending remotely. I'm delighted to host the 2026 Investor Day of Ipsos. It's the first Investor Day during which we will be talking about our strategy for the future years since the one we held in 2022. So this is a day when we unveil what the future few years are going to be for Ipsos. But before I turn to this, I want to welcome the man who created, just over 50 years ago, this company not very far from here, and has run it and chairs it to this day, and has been the man I've been working with over the last several months since I joined Ipsos as the CEO. So with that, I would like to welcome our Founder and Chairman for opening remarks, Didier Truchot.
I have spent 50 years in the company, so now I will take five minutes of your time, which is a pretty difficult exercise, and I would like to just describe what we had in mind when this company was founded 50 years ago, because it's still, we think, relevant. We built that company. We were four at the beginning, and then after six months, we were three, and then two, which explains that when you are building a new organization, you can face some challenges, but we kept in mind, and then we moved from two to three, and so on and so on. Fortunately, I will not go to 20,000 one by one. We kept in mind a couple of principles which we think are still important right now.
One, we should never forget that the business in which we are, the industry in which we belong, is one of the most interesting businesses and industries. We are very proud, every day, during dozens and dozens of meetings around the world, to go to our clients, to present to them what we got from them, what we got from the consumers, the clients, and so on, and to have some interesting and deep discussions about their business, about what this information means, how they can use it, how they can compare it with some other set of informations, and by the way, how we can put many informations together to go to a clear picture on their business challenges and how they can move forward. It's a very, very interesting job.
Unfortunately, not all of you are doing that job, but if you want to go to Ipsos, I'm sure that you will find a job to experiment this strong relationship between people, between us and our clients, between our clients and all our teams across the world. The second idea that we had was to say that information is important, but information does not have any value if it's not used. And it's true that now we are in a world where there are a lot of information, a lot, many more, by the way, sets of information than the one that we had 50 years ago. But this information does not have any value if it's not used. It does not have any value if it's not understood. It does not have any value if it's not coherent.
So it does not give a clear and, let's say, actionable set of information. So you will hear today and months to come what are the plans for Ipsos to develop the value of the information that we provide to our clients, meaning the usage of the information that we are providing to our clients through many different ways: surveys, observations, panels, but also through all the data sets that our clients have close to them, but they don't necessarily use as well as they could. And the third element is about our industry and how the market research industry should manage its future. We have in our company a lot of great people, a lot of great scientists, technicians, analysts, and so on.
But we have in mind also that if all these experts, all these professionals want to work together, want to develop some new technologies and some new ways to look at the world, to understand the consumers, the citizens, and so on, we need at the same time to put them in a situation where they can build a company, where we can develop our revenue, where we can make money. And the reason why we want to make money is not just because we're interested in better money, because we know that by becoming and building and developing a profitable and growing company, we'll remain independent. We are in a world where, especially these days, the notion of independence is not as clear as it should, may I say.
So at least from our perspective, to remain an independent company, meaning to remain a company which has its future in its hands, is extremely important, is essential for our mindset, for our culture, for how we can mobilize both our teams and our clients around us. But of course, if we want to do that, we need to be successful, we need to grow, we need to make money, and this is the roadmap that Jean-Laurent and his team have in mind. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Didier. Thank you, Didier. I couldn't be more proud than to be the CEO of the company you have created and have a chance to continue on what has been built and what you have so eloquently described. Today, Didier just talked about the fact that we have our future in our hand. Equally importantly, our ambition is to lead, which means that we, Ipsos, have the ambition to define the future of the industry we lead. We have the ambition to define how, how quickly, with what tools, with what information, with what value we create for clients, we are going to define the future of this industry.
We have an ambition to lead, and we know that at this point in time, this ambition to lead needs to be grounded in some of the most important innovations that define how a company like us, which collects, processes, provides, analyzes information, which is the ability to use artificial intelligence and new technologies combined with the expertise of our people to build an augmented Ipsos, and it won't be lost on any of you that augmented Ipsos, of course, has the same acronym as artificial intelligence. It is not an end. It's a means to the end of leading our industry and defining its future. It is by investing, building on the legacy of many tools, solutions, and ways of working which are already AI-powered at Ipsos today, and you'll hear a lot about this in the next presentations, including mine.
It is the ambition to use these solutions to create more differentiated and to move into adjacent services that are powered by technology and AI. It is the ambition to provide our people with ever more streamlined, easy-to-use, integrated tools and solutions so that they can focus on the more value-added activities they can provide to our clients. And it is the ambition to put our people at the heart of it. The expertise that Didier mentioned is what makes Ipsos as a services company, as a services company powered by technology and AI, the leader in its market. So I'm the CEO of Ipsos. I joined four months ago. I'll tell you a little bit about myself in a second. We also have in the room a number of our key leaders who will present very real-world examples and illustrations of our strategy after I cover it in general.
We will also have Olivier Champourlier, our CFO, tell us about what I know many of you are interested in hearing about, our numbers and our projections and what the strategy is meant to enable. We will have Andrei, who's the CEO of Ipsos Digital, a very important platform for us, and you'll hear what this is, and some of you have heard about it in previous presentations. We'll have Shaun, who runs several of our key services. We'll have Moneesha, who's in charge of our Market Strategy & Understanding , who'll talk about one of the most innovative global services that we're going to continue and develop and expand. Kelly, who's the CEO for UK and Ireland, who'll talk about integration and analysis of data.
And then we'll look at two very important geographies for us: the U.S., with Lindsay, who runs our various services across North America, and Lif eng, who's the CEO for China. So what are we going to cover today? I'll say a few words about myself. I'll focus on the main strategic choices that underpin our future. And we'll look at the plan, because no strategy is worth anything but the execution. So we'll talk about how we're going to execute, and you'll hear many examples of things we've already started, things we're about to start, things we will do in the next two to three years to put us on the financial trajectory which Olivier will talk about. And then there will be an opportunity for questions and answers.
So let me tell you just a few words about myself, because I've joined not just Ipsos, but I've joined the market research industry a few months ago in September of 2025. Before that, I've been a leader in a very large organization, primarily professional services, high-value-added professional services organization. That sounds familiar? Accenture. I've had responsibilities for digital solutions, for digital services, for AI practice at Accenture, and I've then joined another company, Alvarez & Marsal. What's important is that my career has led me to work and live in the U.S., where I was for part of my childhood, in Japan, where I covered Asia for a number of years, and in many countries in Europe. So I have a very international background.
I'm used to the multifaceted and multi-geography companies such as Ipsos at scale, and most, if not all, of the various steps of my career have been focused on growth through innovation. Finally, either because the parts of the companies I've had responsibility for or the clients I was accompanying as an advisor required transformation, I have extensive experience, not just in how to define the future, but also how to get there through transformation. Why did I join Ipsos? The number one reason, and Didier said it better than anybody could. What Ipsos does is fantastic. The knowledge of how people feel, what they like, what they want, what they want to vote for, what their appetite for certain tastes or for certain colors, or for everything that we can help our clients figure out about the consumers, the citizens, the patients, the clients is what Ipsos is about.
It's a fascinating, fascinating business. But very importantly now, more specifically to Ipsos itself, it's a company that has reached from four to three to two to 20,000 people in 50 years in 90 markets. No company has this breadth and scale in our industry. It is a company that relies on the multiple and very rigorous scientific methods, tools, and skills of our people. That's an unparalleled strength. It's a company that has long-lasting client relationships. I've discussed with many clients since joining, and it's clearly they are here in the long run. Very, very few clients drop any given year.
It's a very international company, of course, and it is a company which has accumulated and continues to develop large amounts of data, which of course is very critical to make sure we deliver the value, but also that we can train models and build solutions for the future that leverage the breadth, multiple services, the depth, incredible expertise within our people, and the history of data that we have. But no company can stand still. The biggest danger is complacency. The biggest danger is to feel, "Hey, we've got all that right. We've always been growing. It's going to be okay." There are a few things that since I joined were very clear to me we can do better at. Number one, and you'll hear these words a lot today, the speed at which we deliver our services.
It has improved, but at a time when speed matters, and I'll illustrate that in a minute more than ever, and it always has, and it's part of the core operating principles of Ipsos. We need to go even faster, way faster. Second, we have built and invested in a wide array of tools and solutions, but as I have experienced in other companies, there are more of those which are partially used and not fully deployed than the ones that deliver the full value that the investments would warrant. So we must have more scale and adoption of the tools we have. Four, we have those long-lasting client relationships, but at the end of the day, it is a house of researchers. It is a house of people who are rightly passionate about what they do and the value they deliver.
But the commercial acumen, and I've been running large-scale organizations where commercial acumen was a big part of the success, and a bit more of that could lead to some more organic growth in the future. And then finally, we have a lot of experience and understanding of the data we create for our clients, but we could do with more expertise on the integration and the analysis of the broader sets of data that Ipsos clients are using every day. And we are about to transform in an industry that is itself, and in a world that is itself, probably changing faster in the next three to five years than it has in the last three to five decades.
Our client expectations continue to rely on speed, but it's no longer, "Hey, can you do it a week faster?" It's now, "If I can create a prompt and with that prompt get an ad drafted in a matter of minutes or hours, I can't wait for a week to get an evaluation of whether this ad is going to be impactful and in which markets." It has to be now. So speed now means real-time or super, super fast. Second, it used to be that finding the data, asking the people, knocking on the doors, placing the calls was important, and it continues to be, and you'll hear how important it continues to be.
However, the massive amounts of data and the variety of data from multiple sources, social networks, open data, the one we provide, the one that sits on our clients' systems where they listen to their own clients, is just mind-boggling. And there's an expectation that people like us who understand marketing, sales, price, social, etc., type of information, help our clients figure it out and integrate the data we provide with theirs. And then the third expectation is that they need us not just to give them the data or to give them the insights, what we find in the data, they need us to increasingly have an ability to help them predict, to help them, to help them, not us, make the right decisions with the predictive and with more foresight than just insight. And AI is making all this possible. We see AI as an opportunity to lead.
AI, of course, will allow us to deliver at speed. And because of who we are and the methods, the tools, the scientific rigor we have built over the decades, we will do that with veracity and reliability. We will provide high-quality data. We'll never compromise on that. AI allows us, in particular, and it's central to the evolution of our industry, to create models of what people might respond, virtual versions of what the real respondents told us. And this is an immense opportunity, but it's as good as the frequency at which and the depth of data with which we trained. So refreshing the data, calibrating, and we'll hear a lot more about that later. And then thirdly, building AI-powered solutions and services is a way for us to deploy the expertise of our people.
Those are some of the opportunities you'll hear many examples of, of why AI is going to make our future possible. And the name of the game, why does this matter? Is because it will allow us to grow. Ipsos has an impressive track record of growth. If you look at our total growth since 1999, it's been pretty impressive. And it has plateaued a couple of times. Probably the first time was more in effect of some currency headwinds and a number of other structural parameters, but the last few years have been soft in growth. And what's a bit more worrisome is declining. It's very clear what the mandate is. Go back to that upward arrow.
We have an ambitious organic growth trajectory because at the end of the day, while we will continue to deploy capital to grow not just organically, but organic growth is the signal that we got things right. So our organic growth from 2026 to 2028 is targeted to be 3%-4% with the investments and decisions we will be talking about in a minute. And beyond that time horizon of shifting and pivoting, it will be above 5% for the 2029- 2030 time horizon. We will do that with the 20,000 people, with the expertise, with the diversity of talent, services, and geographies we operate in. But we will also do that with an extended leadership team. The leadership team we have, the executive management committee has people who represent our key markets, the majority of our revenues, and our key groups of services.
And that is absolutely critical. We have a very business-centric, renewed executive management committee and global leadership team. And that's what's going to make us successful, and you'll hear from a number of our leaders in a moment. How will we take the leadership positions? One of the things I haven't talked about is we have innovated, but we haven't innovated and deployed fast enough. So we will be accelerating, not just how quickly we deliver to our clients, but how quickly we change our ways of working and we develop and deploy new solutions so these ways of working become possible. We will do that radically, not incrementally, and we do that starting yesterday. So what are the strategic choices that underpin our belief that we are going to renew with organic growth and continue to accelerate it with M&A?
The first strategic choice is to say we will leverage our multi-specialist offerings, and I'll go through each one in a bit more detail. The second is that we will double down on the strengths of being a global company with local footprints. The third one is that the number one priority across everything we do will be to deliver services at speed, radically to our clients. The fourth one is to leverage AI as a catalyst for market leadership. The fifth is that we continue to ground our success in our ability to access real people and ask them questions constantly at scale. The sixth one is that we're going to develop, not as our only future value creation engine, but as an additional value creation engine, we will move up the value chain in a number of our services. We will leverage our multi-specialist offering.
What does that mean? Ipsos has tens of different services. One of the things that struck me is the variety of skills, but also things we do for our clients, from political polling to checking how behaviors evolve to measuring the value of a brand. I mean, I could go on and I would probably use the next half hour if I did. That range gives us resilience. That breadth gives us the opportunity to combine not just cross-sell, but combine offerings at the source. If we're able to listen to what people are saying about a brand on social media and we're able to survey the notoriety or the relevance of a brand to the people we ask that questions, then one can help us figure out more things about the other. So combining data from multiple sources is something we will do.
And that will create new differentiated offers that no one else can provide because we are this multi-specialist. The third thing is we will productize, combining the fact that we have the ability to invest, that we have the expertise in-house. We will productize some of the fastest-growing services so that we can deploy them at scale more than we have historically. And then finally, still on the service offering front, we will move into adjacent services like the integration and analysis of data, and you'll hear more about this later when we illustrate those strategic choices and how we will execute. The second key imperative, and that's a big statement, make no mistake, we will continue to leverage our global footprint and our multiple local presence.
This is obviously a way to maximize the return on our investments, so it's a way to maximize our global scale by creating some of those services that we will centralize and manage globally. And you will hear about what those are and why this model of bringing more central innovation and leadership on those services matters. It is also very important to know that when we access real people, it's incredibly important to be present in each of the markets where we need to do that in a country-relevant way, in a culture-relevant way. And then what's also very important is that there are markets like the U.S. and China specifically, which you will hear about later, for which, given their scale and given they are at the frontier of innovation, we need to have, in addition to the broadly defined and deployed strategic imperatives, specific interventions.
You'll hear about how our global footprint also allows us to create additional growth boosters for the U.S. and for China. The third strategic choice is to put speed, and if you haven't heard the word speed by now a zillion times, you haven't heard it once from me, right? Put speed as the absolute priority of what we do. I talked about the fact that it needs to be near real-time, and if it can't be near real-time, it needs to be within a day or two, right? 48 hours is going to be the rallying cry. There might be exceptions, but for the majority of our services, that's where we're headed. That meets our clients' expectations. Being the ones who do it at scale before anybody else is going to be a huge competitive edge. It's not just a rallying cry.
It's not just something we say, "Okay, we're going to be doing it near real-time or in less than 48 hours." We will profoundly enhance the processing chain, everything from what questions should we ask, how do we script them, how do we onboard the people who we need to ask the questions, to how do we process the data, how do we make it palatable and usable and in the hands of our clients so they can interact with it live, right? That whole chain, in order to be near real-time or 48 hours, will be profoundly transformed, not the tools only, but the ways our people use them. Fourth choice, which obviously is a way to achieve that, not just, but in particular, is to use AI as our catalyst for market leadership, to deliver faster, to transform our ways of working.
Also because in an AI world, in a world where agentic allows to develop and make solutions available much faster, our innovation will be accelerated by embracing AI and by creating the modern architectures, which we've already started to put in place. It will power our new offers and services. And what's very important is that many of our clients rely on us to provide data, and we'll continue to do that. And some of our clients are buying a platform and getting data directly. But the expansion that AI allows for, and that combining the AI with the expertise of our people makes us uniquely positioned to grab, is to provide trusted and relevant insights as a service, not just as a platform that goes, checks something out, and provides the answer back.
Something that provides an additional value with the expertise of our people and with the speed and scale of delivery that AI only allows. We will be providing trusted and relevant insights as a service company to our clients. The fifth strategic choice is to leverage the access to real people. We have millions of people whom we can ask questions day in and day out in the various markets. By now, you have this big world map on your mind. This is a critically relevant competitive edge.
Having the access to whether they are citizens, consumers, patients, clients, having the access to these people and being able to ask them the right questions is not only what our clients are demanding of us, what they historically and will continue to demand of us, that we tell them what the people they want to reach or sell things to or provide a good experience to are in need of or expect or feel, but also because that's the way to constantly train and recalibrate and recalibrate again our models, to provide with the variety of things we know about these real people and with the ability to combine the multiple facets of what these people think, do, like. We have an ability to provide our clients with a total understanding of these people.
And then the last point is moving up the value chain in a number of our services. Make no mistake, we will not switch from being an industrial scale provider of data and information to our clients to being an advisor. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about in our swim lane, with the data we provide, increasing the impactful insights, increasing the predictive or the accurate combination of multiple sources of data so that our clients can make faster, better-informed decisions. They will make the decisions. We will provide them with the impactful insights with which they can make them. Not just, "Here's what people say," but, "Here's what matters in what people say." And with predictive capabilities. And in order to do that, we will obviously diversify the profiles of our teams.
We will inject more data, data engineering, data science, and AI talent in addition to the many expertise we have already in-house. So those are the six strategic choices. They define who we want to be or, more importantly, what we want to be. We want to be and we will be the AI-augmented global market research leader, and every one of those words matter as they do, providing and turning data into impactful insights at speed. That's what encapsulates our strategy for leadership. How are we going to do that? I mentioned that it will be an AI-augmented reinvention. So we're going to continue to spend on building and on deploying, not just having the tools that sit on the table, but having our people use at scale those tools and solutions.
We're going to accelerate the speed at which we deliver them, and we're going to accelerate our ways of working. That will allow us to reinvent the core. I talked about the importance of reskilling and continuing to enhance the value we provide by providing, and Didier mentioned that it's a very important word in our strategy, usable market intelligence. Market intelligence that our clients can make informed decisions with, accelerate speed, but also with speed comes increased productivity, and you'll hear in a minute about that, and that's something that I have quite a bit of experience doing, putting more tension into our commercial engine, and we will create the growth boosters. We have an amazing platform, Ipsos Digital, which already today generates EUR 140 million of revenue every year and is growing faster, way faster than the rest of our business, close to 30% a year.
It's more profitable. We're going to double down on this as a big accelerator of our growth. I touched when I talked about our strategic choice to be a multi-specialist company, the fact that we have the ability as a global firm to deploy at scale services if we shift the model a bit, and Shaun will talk about that in a minute, globally managed services, services which we productize, services for which we centralize our ability to make them consistent across the patch and our ability to deploy them at scale. We will go into adjacent markets, particularly Data Integration and Analytics, which Kelly will talk about in a minute. We will do that with one thing that we don't want to change.
Many other things that are successful and that we don't want to change, but one which is important in a time of change for our people in particular, which are operating principles and our core values. These are the fundamental principles of how we operate and what we believe in. Having been through large-scale transformations like this, and I know some of you have as well, having those as sort of the things that don't move when everything else changed, the processes, the tools, the client value propositions is absolutely critical. That will provide stability, consistency, continuity to our people. The second thing is obviously we are a people business, and so we have a specific part of our transformation program which focuses on our leadership and the skills of our people.
I'll talk about that some more after we see the various presentations we're about to go through. Then finally, while I've talked about organic growth and powering up our growth, it won't happen without the continuation of the amazing track record of Ipsos buying companies for accelerated growth. Ipsos has acquired 100 companies in 50 years. It has done so with an approach to integration which, quite frankly, I haven't seen anywhere else. It's fast, it's precise, and it has allowed to accelerate the growth of Ipsos over decades. That will continue when we'll talk, when we go through the numbers about how much we believe that needs to accrete to our top line.
And we will also, in a world where tech matters. There are partnerships that we will strike in a very careful and precise way with the companies which have the building blocks that we believe are best teamed with than built or bought. So with that, I'm going to hand the floor to Andrei. Andrei is the leader who has built Ipsos Digital with many others, but he is Mr. Ipsos Digital. It is the platform on which many of the things that I've talked about, not all of them, are going to be possible, including the obsession with speed. And so, Andrei, please, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Jean-Laurent, for the opportunity to speak and discuss about AI, about Ipsos Digital and synthetic data. So one of the important things is that we are already riding this wave of AI.
I'll give you a couple of examples. Synthesio, our social media analysis, is every month analyzing more than 3 billion posts from 1 million sources with strong LLM, strong foundation. We have several of the agents that are patented. Ipsos Digital that we spoke about is our first full end-to-end attempt to make sure that we connect all the systems in one place in order to deliver what we have heard, speed, extremely important, but also to make life of our clients simpler, make life of our researchers simpler. Synthetic data is something that I will speak more about, but it's at core for a lot of our, for the DNA of the company, understanding data. Then internal AI adoption, we launched 2023 Ipsos Facto, where it is our AI platform where our client data is secure, it's enterprise, so there's nothing leaves our environment.
It has had a fantastic adoption in the company, making sure that people use AI day by day. So our unique position, we speak about a large language at the core. We can also speak about large data models at the core. So the large data models have been at our core from the very first beginning, analyzing data. And now with AI, it's just getting much faster and much better and much deeper. But the human at the core is essential because we need to make sure that the human is interpreting at the end of the day and making sure that we have the relation with the clients still. And data should not be underestimated. The fact that we access millions of studies, that we have data from a lot, a lot of countries and areas of expertise is what differentiates us. Explainable AI at the core.
One thing is that the accuracy of the data models will always need to be founded in our ability to explain. Explainable AI is basically going back and saying, "Tell me clearly where this interpretation comes from." And this is at our core for our DNA. We need to found everything in data, in opinion of people, and making sure that we interpret it correctly. So the truth, the transparency, and the trust that our clients have in giving us their data, in making sure that we treat our respondents with the correct integrity with their opinion. And we share with enthusiasm. I think this is a journey that we are on that is very much about sharing. It's very much about trying, understanding, trial and error in many perspectives. We don't get everything right the first time.
That is our reality, and it will always be our reality. But we need to make sure that we are transparent and we share what we learn. So we have a lot of white papers. We have a lot of points of view. We write quite a lot in this area. We have even a colleague that now is launching a book, Smarter Together, Manuel García-García, who basically speaks about a lot of the things that we have learned. And that's what we want to continue doing. So now is the right time to focus on those few big bets and truly transform our model and leverage AI for, you heard it, speed, productivity, and differentiation. Let's meet Sophie. Sophie is a cat food brand manager.
She can be a cat food brand manager as a human, but we see Sophie in the very near future as potentially also an AI agent at the client that will automatically do what she is doing here as a human. So what is the ask? She wants to understand the Romanian market and its potential for the brand expansion. So she goes in and starts interacting with us, Ipsos, with our initial agent. And that is an agent that starts interpreting what is Sophie really wanting, what is the data that she needs, what is the decision that she wants to make. And based on that initial steps, we are at the same time finding who are the researchers in Ipsos that are best fit to have this discussion with Sophie. Then we give her access to past data.
We give her access to a lot of data that we have. We give her access to she can understand what is said about her brand in the social media or different brands and what other studies have we done for her company in the same place. At that moment, she starts to refine and starts to understand what does she have, and maybe in many cases, we already have the data that she needs, and what is it that she needs to go deeper and understand more about. All this in parallel with the supervision of our researcher, understanding more and more about Sophie, so we refine the need. We can even discuss about maybe she needs a qualitative study. Maybe she needs to deep dive into 20 interviews, and that can be done with AI purely, or that can be done with a focus group.
But the idea of continuously understanding, refining, and then defining what exactly finalizing her research need, what is it that you need, and generate the questionnaire, generate the sample specifications, and having a first meeting with our researcher to understand the market, to understand that the translation, for instance, is correctly done for the language. And of course, she does not need. This can happen within 30 minutes in the middle of the night, and she can launch the study, but we will always make sure that we try to have the human in the loop. And with Ipsos Digital that we discussed, when we started, we started moving from weeks to days. Now we're moving from days to hours. And step by step, from many perspectives, we will be moving to quite a lot of instant data.
And I want to be very clear that the journey that you see right now is not that we have it. We can produce it in some cases. Some parts of this journey are already running and functioning. Some parts we are building. But we're not talking about many years ahead. We're talking about many quarters ahead more. So this is the Sophie journey. And I want to discuss a little bit about how we are leveraging AI for synthetic data now. And we can split it in two parts. One part is data augmentation.
And data augmentation, data boosting, so basically we do 300 interviews and we interpret it. We can extrapolate it to understand much more about different target groups and get it to a 1,000 people, similar to a 1,000 people population, or the data imputation, which is taking instead of asking the respondent 50 questions, we can ask the respondent 15, 10 to everybody, and 5 to every 10th. And with correct statistical methods, with a lot of data that we already have about similar respondents, we can impute the answers. The data augmentation, we have been doing it from pretty much the very first beginning. But with AI, it's accelerated. With AI, we can have a lot more data and a lot more calibration behind. And that is the power, and it is a differentiator.
The PersonaBots, the AI-based PersonaBots, is in essence our ability to take segmentations and make it more human. Human, very lightly said, but make an agent that our clients can discuss with, so this is our ability to make sure that segmentation comes to life much more. Synthetic data or synthetic panels is something that a lot of companies are talking about, and at the end of the day, it's based in very, very profound AI, but also very clear statistical models. We ask a lot of questions from thousands of people, and we are able to predict based on other data. We are also able to predict what they would say about topics that they have not answered. Okay? And of course, huge opportunity, but in the same time, we start narrow. We start in few countries and in narrow groups.
And everything can be and is tested versus real data. And that is the beauty that you can always test all your assumptions versus real data so you don't get wild on anything, so how are we making this the norm? In order to create all this, it sounds easy, but there is an ecosystem that we are basing everything on. There is an ecosystem on software. We have a lot of software to do data collection, to do data lakes, data hub, the reporting panels that we spoke about, that everything that we need to have is really understanding the human at the end of the day, then there is a layer, which is the data layer, the survey data that we get, the qualitative data that can enhance the quantitative and vice versa. Social data, curated, client-entrusted data.
God forbid that they have done studies with other companies, but that's perfectly fine. We can put it in. The more data we can do, the more we can give the depth of the answer to our clients. Intellectual property level, the Ipsos databases, the engineered prompt, the analytical models, and then a layer of agents, and there we have a lot of them already, and we will build more and more and more, and the agent is a specialized agent focused on one task, and the orchestration of those agents is also very important to make sure that when do I pick which agent to do that specific task? When do I pick another agent to validate that that task was done correctly?
On top of that, the platforms, Ipsos Digital that we spoke about is one, but there are several others, the Synthesio, the MediaCell, Mystery Shopping, the Ask Ipsos that will step by step also be a platform, and all this in order to build clear use cases, clear solutions for the different clients, for the different service lines, for our breadth of research that we do, so in summary, building this unmatched research firepower is built on our fantastic teams around the world, our ability to be with our client in their language, in their country, on the data, on millions of data points, billions of data points, on real respondents. At the end of the day, it's essential to make sure that we validate everything with real people. What do they really say, and tech competencies with more than 1,000 people in tech that are building this.
With that said, thank you very much. And Jean-Laurent.
Thank you, Andrei. Before we talk about the diversity of our services, I want to reemphasize a couple of things here. What Andrei described, some of it we have, some of it we will have. Before I joined, I would not have been able to say, "Okay, can we do that quickly enough?" But knowing what has already been started, and you can refer back to an interview that Didier gave in 2020 where he was already talking about the importance of AI as a transformative force in our industry, right? So it's not like we're starting now. And because of the skills we have, we have people who have tried and failed. We have people who have tried and succeeded, fortunately. And so between us and the people that help us, the partners, we have over 1,000 people.
We will be building these things at pace. And building is fine. We will be driving the adoption of the ones we have and then the ones we're building. This is going to happen, and this is going to happen at pace. And this is going to allow the adoption, the expansion, and the productization of our services powered by tech and AI, which Shaun is going to tell you about in a second.
I'm Shaun Dix, as you heard, and I run Creation and Innovation, which is five service lines at Ipsos, which is Creative Excellence, Innovation, a Qualitative Practice, Synthesio, and Observer. As you can hear, I'm a South African, but in my over 20 years with Ipsos, I've lived in various places around the world, which allows me to talk about globally managed services today, which is an important part of Ipsos's ambition, right?
Our innovation, as we've heard today, but also our leadership in the market. So you ask yourselves, what are these globally managed services? There are six of them initially that we are launching this year. I will go into that in a minute. But I will say this is an initial release. We have plenty of these in the pipeline, which we will release at a later stage, which is a great position to be in. We have two from our Creative Excellence Practice. For those that don't know, that's advertising research, creative development, which helps clients in the early stages of the creative development process. Very strategic, very important. It's like the foundation of your house that you're building.
Creative assessment, or copy testing, as many people in the industry know, is by testing ads and measuring their effectiveness and seeing how they can help clients' market share and sales improve. We have three in innovation, which is concept testing and idea testing, product testing, helping clients to get superior products, and in packaging testing. And we're sitting today at Ipsos BVA. Through this acquisition, we've inherited a great solution in Pack from PRS IN VIVO, which allows us to take unique IP and, of course, Ipsos's global reach and scale and combine this to extract more growth from the markets. And of course, Behavioral Measurement, which my colleague Moneesha will talk more about in a few minutes. So why is Ipsos going on this journey? Well, of course, it's about global consistency through, as Jean-Laurent you spoke about, productization, which is very important for our clients.
They expect standardization and a certain level of quality from us, right? Having a stronger marketing position in the market is important because we have unique and ownable IP in the market, which differentiates ourselves from our competitors. This is a good position to be in. We will have dedicated resources globally and locally with clear accountability. Of course, this allows us to innovate. We heard a lot from Andrei about AI and Jean-Laurent. We have infused AI into these solutions that I've already mentioned on the previous chart. Some of them are augmented with AI, agents, synthetic. Some are standalone products, right? Of course, our objective here is to target global client mandates. It's what we do really well, right? This is where we can get the growth.
We believe we can extract double-digit growth for Ipsos, several hundred million EUR over the next few years, and we know the addressable market is large, so an example of this is Creative Spark AI. You may have heard of this if you were in the Investor Day speech a year ago. Now the market has expected us to move on with our AI capabilities. If we look at social media as an example, and we look at a beauty, a global beauty client who's gone from a few years ago and producing hundreds of social media ads to today to literally thousands of ads. And we assume that that may go to 10,000 ads on the tens of thousands of ads by 2030. And many of the CEOs are speaking about shifting their advertising and media budget to almost half in this space.
So we have expanded our solution here to be available in many markets. As I've said, globally, this is very important, but to include all the social media platforms, TikTok, the Meta platforms, YouTube, but of course, the important static media. What clients expect from Ipsos is not just measurement on a key performance indicator basis. They want us to get under the hood. So with our own AI sandbox, we have generated our own variables that allow clients to understand very easily in real time what those diagnostic capabilities are to explain how adverts are really performing at scale in terms of creative best practices, how their branding is doing, how their logos are being placed in ads, etc. And we've done that with our own proprietary variables that are ownable to Ipsos. Of course, this allows us to go to large volumes of data.
Of course, we are generating our own API capabilities. In layman's terms, this means we can do auto data transforms from our own databases to our client databases because they need the value. They need the explanations on how these vast amounts of social media ads are doing in terms of effectiveness. They don't have this today. It's a real demand in the market. It's very important. Ipsos has world-leading best-in-class services. You'll ask yourself, well, what's new? What's new today? We have a history of working in a matrix organization. You've been exposed to this probably. We've made a commercial decision to have more global oversight in this operating model to balance the power, if you will, to have more centrally run businesses, of course, having the depth in the local markets. That allows us to have that scalability and repeatability.
And again, I said we'll start with six, but there are more to come, right? Having our own unique positions, our own IP in the market is an advantage for us. And it allows us to be better than our competitors, for sure. I mentioned innovation and AI. Andrei, you spoke about Ipsos Digital. We've been very successful with that. We need to do more with that, but of course, take our AI roadmap even further. And of course, our global local superpower, having access to lots of people, large databases across the planet is something that Ipsos has a wealth of, and we can use that. And having the boots on the ground is an important one. Finally, I will just finish with an example of one of the world's largest global entertainment and streaming companies case study where we were working with this company already, right?
So you could call it in our terminology; we would say it's a retain. We managed to retain, win this business last year, and expand it because of our unmatched business expertise, but also that we had a proven track record in this global to regional to local delivery at scale. And that was very, very important for them because you can imagine that in many, many markets. But of course, having a global program leadership model that allows us to be efficient, scalable, more disciplined, and then of course, the IP that I mentioned, having the proven metrics to deliver those business outcomes, very, very important for that client. So in summary, that summarizes the global managed services. And I pass over now back to you, Jean-Laurent, to take us to the next section.
Thank you . Thank you, Shaun.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Shaun.
And I can't wait to see the double-digit growth applied to the first wave of several hundred millions of globally managed services that we put in the six that are here and then continuing to expand on that. And the various pieces of a strategy, as they should, go hand in hand. So the example that Shaun gave of Creative Spark AI, which is pretty impressive in terms of its ability to handle thousands of video clips before they go on social media and assess them rapidly, is standing on the shoulders of the Ipsos Digital platform, right? So this is really a very integrated program. We're going to go to another globally managed service, which is one of the most innovative, I would say. They all are, but this one struck me as being particularly interesting and very real-world. What do people actually do in their daily lives?
That's going to be Moneesha with Behavioral Measurement. Moneesha.
Thank you, everybody. Thanks, Jean-Laurent. Thanks all for being here. Thank you, Shaun, for that introduction on what a globally managed service is. I'm going to start by telling you all a little bit about what Behavioral Measurement is. It is all in the name. It is in-the-moment intelligence on how people consume, use, or buy products and services. This is something that is really important to our clients. What does it actually do? It gives our clients a consumer-driven algorithm for brand growth. Simply said, it's just a formula of how many people use, buy, consume my brands, how many times, how much are they paying for it? It helps them decompose those big numbers, those aggregate data sources that they get from other places to truly be diagnostic about what they're doing.
It helps us understand by getting to the moments that matter, which is, it allows them to connect the what, when, and how with the who and why so that they can truly target those pieces of advertising that Shaun talked about so that they can truly develop their products and services for that right moment. More and more clients are looking at categories blurring, so breakfast no longer is just about coffee. It could be an energy drink. It could be about hydration. It could be about just a morning walk. Competition is coming from everywhere. Behavioral Measurement helps us truly define categories through the lens of the consumers in that moment. It is invaluable intelligence for our clients. It's important for them because what people do is much more important than what they say they do.
So how do you really connect the two and explore that say-do gap to understand what opportunities exist for them? It is about measuring real behaviors from real people, but at scale. It is intelligence that powers strategy. We talked about organic growth that we are looking for. Our clients are looking for the same. In today's environment, when a lot of our clients are actually getting growth through price mix, this is one metric that a lot of marketers are now making their big KPI. Am I driving organic growth? Am I driving real people buying, consuming, using more of our products? And more often than not, these are very high-visibility KPIs. Our biggest clients who work with us on this service actually use it for reporting as part of their earnings releases. It is a growth booster for Ipsos. This has been one of the fastest-growing services.
What makes us really good and the first port of call for a lot of our clients is the fact that we have immense scale. We talked about our unparalleled scale, our boots on the ground, which allows us to do this in flexible ways, whether I can reach someone online, by phone, in person. All of these opportunities are available to us at Ipsos. We are able to do fit-for-purpose designs. Andrei talked about Ipsos Digital. Do you want this information in 24 hours? We can make that possible. Do you want to go back to the same person over and over again to look at them over a period of a year? We can make that possible. Only Ipsos can do it, and the strength of our panels and partnerships gives us this access to these real people and great technology.
The other element is that these are large engagements and drive long-term partnerships. This is often an off-ramp to lots of strategic discussions with our clients. So we do all of this today, and we are growing. But to really make sure that we capitalize on that and be fit for the future, we do need to transform what we do and how we do it, which means if I'm doing some work understanding laundry behaviors from people today, I may ask them, "Thinking about the last time you did laundry, tell me which detergent you used, what was your wash cycle, what kind of clothes did you wash?" Imagine a world where we have a respondent who's able to give us that information by answering only two or three questions because their washing machine will send signals to their diary app to tell them what load is being washed.
How much detergent they are using is coming from an automated weighing scale that is also connected to that interview device. So it's really about bringing some of those together. Behavioral Measurement as a globally managed service is about transforming what we do by building an enhanced delivery model with our network of global and local teams, scaled and fit-for-purpose analytics, which means applying synthetic data both for enhancement and for representation, reaching those folks that we can't, technology and AI, so really enhancing our data collection toolkit with that integrated app. I'll tell you a little bit about it. And productization. We talked about that, which will allow us flawless execution at scale and with efficiency. Two examples of how this will work today. We have an app, respondent friendly. It helps us capture images. It helps us connect to devices.
Very quickly, within this year, it's going to be about capturing voice and audio, so natural conversations with respondents, live barcode scanning, again, reducing the respondent burden. To give you an example of what that means, if I have two minutes in a survey today capturing a lot of details about what people are doing, that transformed to just two seconds of somebody uploading an image, which is analyzed in real time, telling me not just about what they're doing, but the overall context around it. I know two minutes to two seconds doesn't sound impressive, but imagine if you were asking 10 questions each two minutes long, and that transforms 20 minutes to 20 seconds. A huge improvement, not just from an efficiency standpoint, but also the richness of the information that's available.
In summary, Behavioral Measurement with Ipsos 2026 and beyond as a globally managed service continues to be about real behaviors from real people. However, it's about moving from just asking questions to observing more, to inferring more, and learning more. It is about multi-source connected intelligence, and it's about driving impact from insights. Thank you all.
Thank you, Moneesha. And I think by listening to the examples, to the services, you maybe relate more to what I said very early on when I said, "Why did I join Ipsos?" It's the passion of our people. And you have two examples here, but that's across the board. Wherever I go, whichever team members I meet, whichever role they play, that's what they love to do. And it's easy to understand why it can create passion in our team.
So that's the part where we told you about what we're doing, what we're scaling, but we're also using the abundance of data and the importance of data and the skills that our experts can provide, helping make sense of data, and the technology skills that we're going to keep enhancing at Ipsos to go into adjacent markets, and so that's what Kelly is going to tell you about as we look at our growth plans for Data Integration and Analytics. Kelly is the CEO of our UKI business for the moment.
Thank you all. Brilliant to be with you today.
I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what Ipsos is going to do to harness the AI and technology developments that we can see around us alongside our deep knowledge of the intricacies of research data and, of course, the expertise that our teams bring in each of the domains that Ipsos work to harness an opportunity in an adjacent area, a close adjacent area to our business, which is rapidly growing. First, a little bit about some of the macro-level trends that Jean-Laurent touched a little bit on earlier that mean this is an opportunity for growth for our business. Firstly, it will not escape you that there is a huge surge in both the volumes and the types of data that are available today, whether that's first-party data, CRM data, sales data, social data, media data, research data, open data.
I could go on, but it's not just the volumes and the types. It's the sheer complexity of the data structures and the continuous feeds that are now available across all of those and more that creates complexity, but also opportunity. Secondly, AI developments themselves create opportunities for us to scale, become more efficient, and to take products and services that are analytics and integration-related products across markets and across clients. The other trends relate to clients very specifically. Firstly, clients are really seeking to control their data. They recognize that data in this world where there are volumes of it available, that is a competitive advantage, but only if you can harness it well.
Having control of the data that you own yourself means you want operators to work with you and partners to work with you on your premises where your data is secure and to help you to augment that with other data sources. My last key trend is about the rising demand we are seeing for partnerships with our clients where they want partners to turn this volume and complexity of data into predictive business intelligence to help support their competitive advantage and ultimately their decision-making. These trends accelerate the opportunities for growth in what is an adjacent market for Ipsos, but this is not a completely new thing for Ipsos. Today, we have approximately 1,000 people who operate in our data teams, whether they're data engineers, data managers, or indeed our data analysts.
They operate across some of the business areas that you may know, like mixed market modeling, but also within the core domains that we have expertise, whether that's with brands, with media, public affairs, and indeed healthcare. This is not a new, but it is an interesting and growing adjacency. It is, as I say, a vast and a high-growth market in totality. Data integration itself is about bringing data together from various sources to create one single comprehensive view of the truth. The second is about data analytics is about analyzing data sets to find useful information that are solving problems on very various fields. These are both distinct markets in their own right, but they also interconnect.
And if you look at the sheer scale estimates of this market, there are estimates just for the U.S. alone for data analytics and data integration combined, by 2032 will reach around $400 billion by way of scale. So these are sizable opportunities, but of course, not all of this is an opportunity for Ipsos. And we need to be really clear about the segment of this market where Ipsos has a strength and an opportunity to play. And that is, of course, the part of this market, which is the market research segment, about bringing market research, social research data to connect those data sources that we know increasingly well alongside other data sources, some of those that I mentioned earlier. So the segment that Ipsos is focused on is not the segment that is currently serviced by business intelligence platforms, management consultants, IT integration companies.
It is a market research segment of what is a growing and significant adjacency based on the client demand and the huge opportunities in data, and we do have a unique opportunity and a unique position in this market. It is Ipsos' intent to lead the market research sector, and in doing so, we will also seek to lead in the market research segment of the Data Integration and Analytics marketplace, and as Jean-Laurent set out earlier, we've made strategic choices as a business. Those strategic choices enhance our unique position in this market research segment for DI&A or Data Integration and Analytics. The first of those key strategic choices that will make a real difference to our position is the fact that we will retain our multi-domain expertise, and the second is the sheer geographies across which we operate.
There is no other organization operating in our sector with the scale and the variety of service offerings and the depth of that across the range of markets that Ipsos operates, so if you think about a client problem or a challenge, and I will give you one in a minute, if you think about one of those, being able to bring to that problem not just their data and their understanding of it, but the data we hold on how they interact with the media, brands, and the citizens of the particular country, that holistic approach is unparalleled in this space. The second key strategic choice that I wanted to flag that makes a difference to our position is that access to our own data. We will be bringing our own data to our clients' problems, and that data is based on trusted, reliable foundations of real people.
And this is not just what people think and what they feel increasingly, as Moneesha set out. It is also what they do, how they behave, and passively supporting the measurement of that. This itself creates a strong foundation for AI-powered analytics and indeed in all of the data inputs that may be forming part of any synthetic data-supported tools too. And the third I wanted to flag was the fact that we are tech-agnostic. We have, yes, 1,000 fantastic technologists within our business, as Andrei said earlier, but we are able to work with the changes in AI and keep pace with those given our tech-agnostic situation at Ipsos and to work on client premises with their technology solutions, whatever they have chosen to have in-house. That is a fantastic additional competency too.
So now a real-life example, and I bring you one from a luxury automotive company from a study that we've just recently finished, an engagement with this client. If you think about car dealerships and where they are located, how are those decisions taken? Actually, in this scenario, they were taken on a more ad hoc basis previously, but it was recognized that with a more data-centric and information base, you would be able to create decisions made on a solid foundation of data and evidence, which would help you increase sales revenue, sales of new cars, servicing revenue from new cars if you were able to pinpoint the best geographical locations based on the proximity to potential buyers and people who would be having those cars serviced.
Now, of course, Ipsos' engagement in this can work with this client's data and their first-party data, the historical sales records that they have and the demographic characteristics that they have. But we can also bring to bear other things that matter whenever you're thinking about who might buy a luxury vehicle. For example, their socio-cultural political views, perhaps their economic attitudes, geospatial and wealth luxury consumer trends data. We have a host of data that, when brought together in the right way, can help clients understand how to maximize sales revenue from the location in which those dealerships are situated. And indeed, this is what Ipsos has done in this scenario. I'm going to show you something nice. This is just a mock-up of some of the work that we produced, but do not go and make investment decisions and place dealerships in any of these locations.
This is dummy data only, but this data was and the decision-making that took place within this organization. Everything we did was visible at the board level. It fed into their commercial decision-making, their forecasting models, and today, now this AI-based analytics that is helping support monitoring how the dealerships are performing and indeed allowing people to make changes in real time to improve performance, so in summary, this area is a great opportunity for us given that it is a close approximate adjacency where we already have skills, expertise. Today, we do in and around EUR 100 million in this already across a range of different service offerings, and it's our intent to create investments in this space, which will allow us to take it to 10% of Ipsos' global revenues by 2030, and there are three key things that we will be doing.
The first is ensuring that our global service offerings are treating innovation around Data Integration and Analytics as a key priority and investing in that around our core disciplines. The second, the proportion of our staff base and how that looks today, shifting to have more data engineers, data management, and AI professionals at our core. And then importantly, this is also a priority area for Ipsos for partnership and for acquisitions. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you. This is a mouthwatering adjacent opportunity. When I was running one of the verticals at Accenture, this was really the space I operate in.
I know that if we are in our swim lane, as Kelly has described, focused on the data that centers on the market research type of information around marketing, sales, social, etc., this is a significant growth opportunity for Ipsos, and we will seize it. It's not something we can just switch on and get done because it will change the work mix. It will change potentially for acquisitions, but this is a market we're going to go and conquer. Now, we've talked a lot about what, and we've talked a lot about adjacencies, but now let's switch gears and look at the geographies. I said that you have two flags here that are close to each other, and the two leaders of that market are close to each other in the room. That's here.
But the reality now is that those two markets are at the frontier of innovation and are very, very, very big. And so our strategies leverage what you've heard and add on to it. And what I wanted to make sure that you hear from the leaders coming from these two markets, how we're going to make specific interventions that are relevant to each of them. So we will start with the U.S. and with Lindsay, who is the Group President for Ipsos North America. Lindsay.
For having me here today and excited to talk a little bit about what we are going to do in the U.S. market and specifically highlight how we have a very connected plan from what we've heard from Jean-Laurent and my colleagues about unified bringing this strategy to life in the market to win with our clients and win more.
I think a few key things that I want to touch on is the fact that we will be leaning in to accelerate our Globally Managed Services. We know these are areas where we can grow and grow more, so we will be dialing that up. We will be scaling our Ipsos Digital offering. This is something that meets the needs and demands of many of our clients to meet their questions with business speed in the moment and agile answers. We'll be advancing, like Kelly talked about, our insights, our integration, and our analytics. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that, of how this meets a big market need we see that's increasing and will only accelerate with AI.
And as Jean-Laurent talked about earlier, it's not only about what we're going to be doing in the future, but about the things we are going to do to deliver today to accelerate the things that we can do with our commercial behaviors, our talent, and to win now in our market. I want to first set the foundation when we talk about where the strategy meets the market and what the opportunity is we see for the U.S. specifically. We know today that there is a projection for outsized economic growth, even though the U.S. is a mature market. There's projections of it being 1.5x -2x even the growth we see in Europe. So we know this is an important market for Ipsos to win not only in the U.S., but for our global growth.
I'll talk about how we see those two interconnected. The U.S. market is home to nine of the 10 world's most valuable global brands. They are headquartered in the U.S., and seven of those 10 are located in the western region of the United States, which is where we see the epicenter of AI, technification, and category disruption happening. These are companies like Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, just to name a few, where we can really lean into the center of gravity to help how we transform our company and grow. We see this as an opportunity for us to design disproportionate growth very purposefully, not only through the strategy we have built, but through the execution excellence we will bring to our clients in the market.
I think there's a couple of things that I wanted to touch on, first starting with how we are going to win with tech giants and beyond in an AI world. This is about us bringing that truth and trust to bear in how we are winning today with clients. I first want to talk about how we are winning with some of the largest clients in the market. When we talk about the world's most valuable companies, including the tech giants, they sit on more data than anyone in the world. Kelly talked about this with the multiple sources of data that many of these companies are sitting on. Yet they are coming to Ipsos to choose us to help them contextualize all of this big data, to help them provide the human nuance to make important, trusted, high-stakes decisions. Why do they do this?
Because more data does not always mean more understanding, and AI often is creating a lot more noise, and these clients are coming to us to help them distinguish the signals for their business from the massive data noise. We see that real humans in the loop, like Andrei talked about, at speed, are going to be critical to helping our clients create additional unique data, points of view, and helping to provide a competitive advantage for their business. This is mission-critical for our clients and the world's largest companies to make strong, impactful business decisions.
In fact, one of our senior executive clients at a big tech firm said to me, "Lindsay, the reason I continue to come to Ipsos is because I know you will help us provide real human truth so I can make confident decisions for our board, our team, and our customers." and this is why they continue to come to Ipsos. We know this is a market advantage and opportunity for us because, as we have heard with our strategy, we're going to continue to invest in verified human access and intelligence at scale. We specialize. We specialize. I think this is really important in proprietary and unique data sets for our clients. We heard this from Moneesha, that this is important. Every company out there wants unique data and information to hold that competitive advantage, and we are a unique partner to help them do that.
We are embedded, as Kelly talked about, in clients' decision and workflows. We have APIs into their stacks and their data ecosystems to allow us to be a seamless partner in their decision-making on an ongoing basis. This is important for you to understand because it allows us to be an integral part of the system and is easy to unseat in terms of our ongoing partnership. When we think about this, I talked about big tech companies, the tech giants, and all of the data that they sit on today, but this scales well beyond tech and is doing so at an increasing rate because as more companies bring in more big data, lean into the technification, and leverage use of AI, they are going to require more human nuance and contextual understanding that Ipsos can provide as a key partner for them.
This really is an evergreen market need that we are seeing increase with the use of AI in an AI world. The next area where we are going to lean in and really focus is the B2B space, particularly in the U.S., but for global as well, and we'll hear a little bit more about how this is relevant in both the U.S. and China, but this is an area where we know demand is growing. We know that this is a large, underserved market, particularly from the market research industry, and I'll talk a little bit about that, but you will see that there is as much economic value in commercial buying behaviors, decisions, product development, marketing as there is in the consumer side, listen to many companies' earnings reports, and they talk about the growing revenues coming from the commercial side of their business.
So we know this is a good opportunity for us to continue to win and grow with Ipsos. There are high-stake decisions that are being made as part of these commercial growth plans for many of these companies and our clients. And the research industry historically has been built on models and methods that were built for consumer decision-making. These models break down and do not deliver the rigor that is necessarily needed for complex business decision environments for marketing and for brand growth. But the good news is that at Ipsos, we have been doing this for several years, partnering with some of the world's largest B2B organizations, both on the consumer side and the commercial side, to help them make important trusted decisions.
An example of this to bring this to life for you is we were working with and have been with a large global technology platform who was looking to amplify their reach, their awareness, and their engagement with small to medium business buyers and large enterprise buyers. They needed help with their communications and to scale this quickly. We not only were able to bring them real access to these professionals, but leverage some of our services, like Shaun talked about earlier, to help them refine their messaging, define their platform, and engage their customers. By doing this, we were able to help them redefine their communications platform, have a measurable lift in awareness among their key targeted buyers, and also increase engagement.
Not only did this drive measurable business impact for this client, but it also won them many industry awards for their creative, which is very difficult to do in the B2B space. Not only have we helped them have an impact on their business, they are bringing us along on the journey to scale this product and offering globally as they continue to grow as an organization because we have embedded ourselves as a strategic partner with very important information and nuanced insight to help them grow their business. So we are already trusted by many of these global B2B leaders, and we will continue to invest and develop here. Lastly, we see the U.S. market as an important global launchpad for scalable growth.
It's not about just doing something in isolation in this specific market, but it's about leveraging the gravity of headquartered large companies in the U.S. for a decision center for multi-market programs. We know often when we win a starting program in the U.S. with the headquarters of a company, we can help them take that and scale it to many other markets globally, and this is something that we will purposefully lean into doing more in our partnerships with some of the most important companies in the world. The next thing that we will do. I talked about at the beginning how there's many of the world's largest companies headquartered in the western part of the United States. This is very much where there's an incubator, growth, development, and innovation mindset happening.
And this presents an opportunity for us to co-develop offers and, with proximity to these companies, help understand what are the things that are most relevant to help drive their business decisions. And as Shaun talked about, as we will build more globally managed services to help really drive the future of our company, we will use the proximity of these companies to help do that and build globally exportable IP that we can scale and grow overall. And last, we will see that the strategic market symmetry will happen in terms of using this as a headquartered budget decision center, an innovation incubator, and doing this simultaneously with China as well as two key market engines to drive the growth. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you, Lindsay.
When I first went to the U.S. and met with Lindsay and the leadership team in that market, I was initially surprised. I was saying, "What? Those big tech giants? Is it really how big they are as clients of ours? They handle data. They have their own AI and data engineers and all that." The reality is both because we provide access to the real people in addition to all the data that they get through their systems and through their platforms, and the reality is because we provide the expertise to make sense of that data in a way that very, very few companies, if any, in the world can, makes them some of our largest clients, so that was very impressive, and that's something that we will make sure we continue and expand upon.
But let's go to another innovation frontier, China, with the CEO of our Greater China business, Lifeng Liu.
Thank you. China story. The first thing I want to share with you is China. Ipsos in China, we have been the leader in the market for decades. We have been outperforming the market even after the COVID when the market is shrinking. And today, the most important message I hope you can remember after this investor day is, after we activated the six strategic focus mentioned by Jean-Laurent Poitou in his presentation, including AI, including AI access to people, including speed and integrated services across different service lines, our clients are happy with our fast deliveries. They are happy with our capabilities in terms of addressing their business questions. And being a global and local company, we are also helping Chinese clients go global.
By doing all those kinds of things, acting all these kinds of things, I'm happy to tell you now, Ipsos in China, we are again on a very good organic growth trajectory. I'm going to give you a few examples of how we are activating those kinds of initiatives, starting from AI, how our AI capabilities are incubated and activated in China. As mentioned by Jean-Laurent and also Andrei and also Kelly, our team in China, our AI lab, and also our data lab team, they are now leveraging AI and data analytical capabilities, helping clients come up with new product ideas by analyzing supply side and demand side information. By doing this, actually, we have significantly improved the speed of the innovation process and the success rate of many clients. That's the first example.
Second one, also by leveraging AI and social analytic capabilities, we are now, you know, China is a market. Social media marketing is one of the important approaches to generate sales, so we are leveraging AI and also social analytic capabilities to help our clients to better select better social influencers, to draft better content so that they can have better returns from social marketing campaigns. Andrei mentioned about PersonaBots, so we also trained PersonaBots in China so that our clients could ask questions to those bots anytime for their concept testing, screening, or inspiration purpose. Here, we are in Paris. About 15 months ago, we had a successful Olympic Games, but that's another story from China. One of our leading clients, the management team, they were struggling with two versions of advertisement. Within one day, they were struggling and they don't know what to do.
Within one single day, Ipsos, we trained 60 PersonaBots using their transcript of qualitative studies, the previous studies. We helped them select the better copy within one single day. The clients are extremely happy, and they announced this kind of wonderful collaboration in their official WeChat account. As Jean-Laurent mentioned, access to people is probably the most important competence for Ipsos. We are also enriching that in China. You know, China is people spend a lot of time on social media. With our new access to people approach, now we can help to acquire consumers' responses from the social platforms. You know, China, there's a big market with social network users, 1 million +. By doing that, we can actually access them in a very cost-effective way. Also, not only access to consumers, but also to business decision-makers.
As Lindsay mentioned, B2B business is a great opportunity for us. Our capability to access business decision-makers, social media influencers in China has been further enriched, and it has uplifted our B2B business in China dramatically, and nowadays, many Chinese companies, they become new buyers in research. They often start by data. So by providing high-quality data in large scale with speed, we have greatly boosted our uptake business in China. We are a global company with a strong local footprint, and Ipsos, we have been in China to help many Chinese clients like Huawei. Did they actually visit Huawei a number of years ago? Xiaomi and also many other automotive clients to develop competitive go-to-market strategies, and our innovation team, innovation service lines, helped our clients develop their product and the service strategy globally very successfully, and in China, we have initiated studies several years ago.
We observe the Chinese brand, their trust of global consumer to our Chinese brand. From this chart, you can see Chinese clients are in a very critical moment. In the history, the first time, Chinese brand, the trust level will no longer be negative in the developed market, and you can also see Chinese brand has reached a new high in the emerging market. Many Chinese brands now, they realize, Lindsay, take it easy. They realized they need to build their brand by providing emotional benefits. They need to build a brand globally, and this is a great opportunity for us because they are going to make a big leap forward from value for money to brand building, and we are going after the United States. I hope one day there are several big clients who could be hosted in China, so this is a great opportunity for us.
We have a very strong brand research team. We have a very strong advisory team. And Ipsos, we are number one in China. We are very happy. We have been the partner for them to go in the global market. And we will also be the partner for them to build a strong global brand. In summary, looking forward, I'm very confident that Ipsos in China will make more contributions to the group. And also, of course, we will help more Chinese clients, more international clients to succeed even greater in China and also globally. Thank you.
Thank you, Lif eng. Thank you. Okay. Still a lot. So final stretch, we'll go to the Q&A, but I have to explain something here. All of this is significant change. It will mean significant change for our people. It will mean the ability to grow organically and to complement with M&A.
That won't be possible if a number of things which I alluded to, our operating principles and our core values, are not the one thing, the one set of principles and values with which people can recognize Ipsos for what it is. We will continue to operate under those four operating principles that we provide reliable information, never, ever compromise on this, that we provide information that is simple, that is accessible, that is usable, that's the substance behind it, and it's been scientifically grounded, and it's delivered at speed. As you can see here, as many times as we've used the speed word, it's been there forever. It's radically different tomorrow from what it was yesterday. That thing isn't new at Ipsos. Our core values of integrity, and you understand why integrity. There is a very solid reason why we need to protect integrity.
Curiosity as a thing that makes us market differentiated among many others. The collaboration, one of the things that I personally enjoyed about the sequence we just went through. This is a team. They collaborate. They have so many different points of views, places, and things that they do, but it's collaboration, client-centricity, client-first, and of course, the entrepreneurial spirit. Those things are going to be what allow us to have some stability through the transformation. Our people, we have a specific work plan to continue and enhance the employee value proposition, to continue and enrich and solidify and diversify our leadership bench, to continue and expand the cultural traits of our people to be the Ipsos that we see are going to be so different from yesterday. On leadership, I'm a big believer that leaders will be better leaders as they have more diversified experiences.
So we will accelerate the rotation of our people. We're going through a talent assessment of a large number of our key leaders, and we will mobilize our HR group and the leadership development program that has already started, which is tremendous, to create a solid, diversified in their experiences, in where they come from, and in what they do, leadership bench. On skills, it's very clear that this can't happen if the skills of tomorrow are the skills of yesterday. So we are engaged in a very significant workforce planning effort to make sure we have the right skills in the right places, including significantly expanding on the 1000+ people that do data science, data engineering, and AI engineering, as you would expect. And then we will continue to evolve the culture of Ipsos. You heard about globally managed services.
That means an appetite to both be very local but also leverage those solutions. I can't wait for the moment that our ability to help social influencers in China have a better impact in the market becomes one of those globally managed services. But you see the culture shift. So people embrace what comes from elsewhere rather than focus on what's invented here, and of course, enhance the commercial skills and talent of our people. And then finally, M&A, because we are not going to build everything we talked about. We're not going to build everything that's necessary to make that vision a reality. And so tech and AI acquisitions for building blocks that we believe are going to be faster bought than built. Adjacent market expansion, Data Integration and Analytics is an obvious case in point.
We'll see if we find attractive valuation targets that we can go after in this space. And we will continue on the successful trajectory where we believe it can help us establish a leadership position in a market where we don't have one by buying more Ipsos-like companies in specific markets and segments. Of course, the first two are going to be the ones where we dedicate the majority of our acquisition firepower. And you'll hear in quantitative terms with Olivier in a minute what this is about. So those are the three enablers to make the transformation possible at scale and at pace. And with that, I would like to now come to the point that many of you have been waiting for for the last hour and a half, which is the numbers. And the numbers will be presented to you by Olivier, our Chief Financial Officer. Olivier.
Good morning, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, I'm the new Group CFO at Ipsos. I've been with Ipsos for 20 years, working very closely with the two former Group CFOs. This journey has given me a deep understanding of our organization, our business model, and our culture of financial discipline. It's a real pleasure to be with you this morning to share our business plan, our strategic plan, which translates into a trajectory of value creation. To set the stage, the plan has three priorities. First, it's to accelerate growth. Second, it's to improve our profitability. And third, it's to generate strong cash flow in order to finance our investments, but also increase the return to our shareholders. Let me start with our recent performance, and then I will explain how we are going to deliver on those three priorities.
Starting with 2025, I would like to confirm first that our preliminary results not only dated for 2025 are consistent with the guidance we gave to the markets in October, which means an organic growth of 0.6% and an operating of 12.3%, which is at constant scope, the equivalent of 12.8%. We are to move from 12.8% to 12.3%. So we have this year the effect of two big acquisitions In fas and BVA that have a dilutive effect of 50 basis points. We finished the year with a healthy balance sheet. Our financial structure is very good. The net debt/EBITDA ratio is at 0.5%, which is good. What does it mean? It means that we have plenty of credit facilities that we can use to finance the ambitious strategic plan that Jean-Laurent and the rest of the team have described to you.
Now, I would like to talk a bit more about our organic growth and how we are going to accelerate. As you can see, our growth rate over the last three years, on average, was at 1.6%. And we are not satisfied about it. This is why we are launching this strategic plan, which is to accelerate the growth over the next five years. We will do it gradually. We plan to have a growth between 3%-4% over the next three years, and this will accelerate over this period to achieve a growth rate of 5% from 2029. What are the key drivers to accelerate on the growth trajectory? So as we have explained, first, we are going to push some services, some high-potential services like the Globally Managed Services. Those are services that are already experiencing a double-digit growth, a good level of growth.
We are going to push and to expand them even further. Secondly, we have an Ipsos Digital platform, which is the do-it-yourself platform that is very successful. The level of business with this platform is around EUR 140 million, a growth of around 30%. This will continue in the future, but we can do even better because this platform is not huge at scale in all markets. Third point is to develop adjusted services like Data Integration and Analytics. Kelly explained to you what it is about. Then a fifth driver, it's about speed. By delivering faster in real-time information, we will reduce the cycle time and have some competitive advantage, which allows us to win market shares from our competitors. Lastly, as part of our values, client-first is an important one. By being more client-centric, we will be able to grow faster.
So this is all about commercial excellence. So altogether, those levers will support a solid, diversified, sustainable path to growth acceleration. This growth acceleration will, of course, come with an acceleration also of our profitability. You can see that the average profitability over the last three years was at 12.8%. We want to accelerate and achieve 13.5% from 2028 and go beyond 14% in 2029. There are three drivers that we have identified to accelerate and improve our gross margin. First, it's about the business mix. Obviously, we are going to push the GMS. We're going to accelerate the use of Ipsos Digital. We are going to enter into adjacent markets like the I&A. And all those services now on offer today deliver higher margins than our traditional model. So by pushing them further, it will have a positive impact on our business mix.
The second point, it's about productivity gains. So what is it about? It's about being more efficient in our operating model. We are going to invest in AI-driven improvement across our operation. And this will help to increase the speed of execution and, in the end, a better utilization of our resources and provide, obviously, productivity gain. And the last one, it's cycle one. It's the dilutive effect of our acquisition that we are experiencing in 2025, which will go down over time. So we will benefit from synergies with our two, the last two biggest acquisitions. As a result, this trajectory supports our ambition to deliver an adjusted EPS growth of 8%. So our EPS, sorry, adjusted EPS growth, we plan that it will grow by 8% YoY , starting from 2026. Now, the last question is about our cash allocation plan for the next five years.
How are we going to finance this ambition plan? So first, we will probably increase our additional debt up to a maximum of EUR 600 million and/or an equivalent of the maximum of 2x EBITDA in terms of leverage. Secondly, as we will accelerate on growth and improve our profitability, we are aiming to reach a free cash flow of EUR 1.4 billion over the next five years, which is, in average per year, will be EUR 280 million. And now the next question is, how are we going to spend all those resources? First, we are going to invest up to EUR 1.2 billion mostly in acquisition, in M&A, but as Jean-Laurent described it to you. And also, we will invest in CapEx, in innovation, in incremental CapEx, innovation, transformation, investment in AI. So it's a huge amount, but this is what we are aiming to invest.
And then, of course, we will associate our shareholders to the success of the company. And in that respect, we are aiming to increase the return to shareholders between 40%-50% of the Adjusted EPS, mostly through dividends. This is more than what we have given to our shareholders in the last few years because we were in the range of 30%-35% of the Adjusted EPS. And last but not least, of course, it's really important for us to associate all the talent, the managers, the staff to the success of the company. And as the company will grow over time, we will increase the employee free shares plan that we will give to our team. And here, we have an estimation of investment of EUR 150 million-EUR 200 million. So as you can see, we have an ambitious plan.
And we will lead up on a solid financial position. Our objective is clear. We want to accelerate on growth. We want to improve our margin, and we want to increase return to our shareholders. Thank you for listening. But before, I would like to say a big thank you to all the Ipsos colleagues that have really worked hard today to present you this plan. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Olivier. That was a nice final touch, indeed. I can only associate. So we're going to go through Q&A. Thank you for listening. And the floor is going to be open both in the room and on the phone line. I think we have a first question here.
Over time. And one of the reasons, but also one of the consequences of this growth trajectory, has been the fact that our people have grown.
So Kelly started as a junior trainee. No, it's not right. She was already coming from E&Y, I think. But anyway, and I would like just to ask the new Chair of the company who will start her job March 1st, as you probably have seen. Laurence has started in Ipsos in 1998 as a Financial Director. She did prepare with me and with the Board the IPO of Ipsos that we managed in 1999 at the top of the internet bubble. So it was a good time to go to the stock market. And then she moved across the company, across the jobs. She became the Deputy CEO of the organization before 2010. She has worked with me closely.
When I did inform the board that, unfortunately, I would not be able to stay in my position for some health reasons, everybody thought that she was the best option that the company had because of her experience, because of her talents, because of her dedication to the company. So my question to Laurence is, how do you feel now?
Well, first of all, it's with a profound emotion, Didier, that I will take over from you as president. And I'm using the word president for a good reason. It's because chairwoman doesn't sound right. I am not superwoman. So I will be the president of the company, and I will use the French word for that. And I would like, of course, to thank Didier and my colleagues at the board for their trust and confidence. And some of them are in this room today with us.
So thank you so much for your confidence in me. Obviously, I know our industry extremely well, being there for 27 years, plus three years as a student. So it's a total of 30 years. And I know the company from the inside, having built what I would call its global infrastructure. For those who know me very well, I am a total fan of technology. Why is that? It's because I don't like to waste my time, and I like anything that can help me save my time. Okay. And of course, like any woman, I have raised three children, but I have been away visiting all our Ipsos countries more than half of my time.
So I can tell you that I was the first person in Ipsos to have its computer linked to its cell phone back in 1998 to still be in touch with Paris when I was traveling. So I started acquisitions in technology back in 2018. This is when I convinced, first of all, myself, and then Didier, and then the board to acquire Synthesio, our first investment in technology. Synthesio is our social media listening platforms, and I am a great believer in using social media data and any other data that exists. And of course, I have also decided to create Ipsos Digital, and I was lucky to convince Andrei Postoaca to join back Ipsos to lead these initiatives. So it is a great responsibility to lead at this time the board, but also to accompany Jean-Laurent, its renewed management team, and all our Ipsosians.
You need to know that 60% of Ipsosians are women, and they are all very happy to see a woman as the President of the company today. But we have, of course, with my colleagues of the board, the full determination and commitment, but determination is a stronger word for me, to create the conditions for the teams to raise their levels because we have great people, but we need to raise the stake, to raise the level. We need to act quickly to reinvent ourselves and make real what you have described and that I liked very much, this augmented Ipsos. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Laurence. Ipsos wouldn't be what it is today without Laurence. I talked about just one example. I talked about how rapid it is to integrate companies. This is one example, and Synthesio and Ipsos Digital is the platform.
So I couldn't be happier, Mrs. President, than to be working with you and to continue to work with Didier as a board member and with the other board members, those present today and those not, to take the company to the next stage and to write this exciting next chapter. So thank you very much. And with that, we are opening up to the second question. Olivier, if you want to join me. And okay, here we go.
Thank you, Jean-Laurent. Yeah. Conor O'Shea from Kepler Cheuvreux. Just three quick questions from my side. Firstly, on the EUR 1.2 billion investment that you've outlined over the next several years, just to understand, does that exclude CapEx? Is that only M&A? And if it does, do you also expect an increase in CapEx as a percentage of revenues over the next year? How much, if we could have that?
So I'll start under the watch of Olivier. No, it's not only acquisition. It includes investments, which do include CapEx. And the split will obviously depend on the acquisition opportunities and on the build or buy choices that come along the way. If you want any other comment?
Yeah, no, absolutely. In this EUR 1.2 billion, we have a big proportion of acquisition, mostly acquisition, but it's also additional CapEx to investment in AI and so on that we have embedded in this envelope.
So roughly, what do you expect the CapEx as a percentage of revenues to increase to? A range versus the current rate?
We are going to continue to be very disciplined in the way we spend our money. So we don't expect that the CapEx ratio over turnover will increase significantly. We are going to manage that in a very disciplined way. Okay.
And if you don't find sufficient M&A opportunities at an acceptable price, given a market that's competitive in that respect, will you consider share buybacks? Olivier, I think you said the returns to shareholders will be mostly through dividends, but does that leave the door open to buybacks at these share price levels?
We have not decided yet to use a share buyback plan, but it can be, yes, integrated in this return to the shareholders.
Last question. We're given guidance on margins for the next three years as an average, which is very helpful. Is there a possibility that margins first go down for the increase? So in 2026, should we expect with the extra investment, the EUR 1 billion in AI, that over the next five years, that margins could decrease a little bit before increasing?
We will be able to talk about our guidance for 2026 next month when we disclose our final results, which you got a preview of after auditing, and when we talk about our guidance for 2026.
Understood. Thank you.
Good morning. Emmanuel Matot from ODDO BHF. Thank you for this presentation. Several questions. First, how do we have to compare your organic growth ambitions with your addressable market? Are you in a position to win market shares or not in the coming years? Second, what has Ipsos learned from the previous roadmap, which had also great ambitions, but was not able to achieve all of them? And my last question, after a few months at Ipsos, Jean-Laurent, what is your view of the public affairs business? Because it is concentrating lots of difficulties currently.
Do you plan to further invest on it, or could we consider it as, I don't know, an asset for sale in the coming years in case of no recovery of that business? Thank you very much.
Okay. On the market share question, obviously, we have looked at the market at large and in every way, shape, and form. The reality is, with these growth rates, it's quite clear that we would be gaining market share. But one number I don't obsess about is how big is the market, because there are estimations that range from EUR 90 billion-150 billion. And the reality is that we are in one of those professional services markets.
It's not the only one I've operated in, where any single player, as large as it could be, as large as Ipsos is in the market, social research, is always going to be single-digit percentage points of the market. So the reality is our growth depends on what we do and how well we execute what we talked about today, not about the market CAGR. That's the answer. Really, it is the very candid answer to the market share point. It's about us and how we define the future of our industry, first and foremost. What have we learned? I mean, we've learned a lot.
I said a few things already in the introductory comments about the need to accelerate the pace at which we innovate, about the need to adopt, to not build technology for technology's sake, but to consider that whatever we budget for the new solution we're spending technology money on. We have the means, the management focus, and the way of deploying these solutions. Believe me, making usable and adopted technology solutions, as I've done a lot in my life, is one of the reasons why I believe we already have, and it's good news, we already have things that if we push the let's use it a lot more and let's mandate that it be used more where it isn't used enough, we can fast-forward growth.
So those are a couple of things, but I said a few others around the commercial excellence muscle we've got to continue and build up. On PA, yes, I think you said it's been struggling. Yes, last year, you heard, for those of you that were on the Q3, that it was a drag on our growth. There were times in history where it was a boost to our growth. The reality is it's part of our diversified model. It's part of when I say we are continuing strategic options. Strategic choice, number one, is to continue with our diversified model that does include PA. It brings some of the resilience we believe in. Doesn't mean we are satisfied with the growth as it is. It's part structural. There are always electoral cycles, macro-political situations, and public spending cycles that drive some of the PA fluctuations.
But the reality is there are a number of things that we can and will do to boost the growth of PA. It wasn't a core tenet of the strategy today, but I'll give you one example. We know what policies and what quantified impact those policies have in some countries. I don't think we do a good enough job today of globally spreading that so that we can tell public decision-makers, policymakers in other markets, "Here, here's what we found about public transportation and how people feel about this and that way to change it in this city or in this country and take it elsewhere." We also create a lot of political and social studies that we publish out there. I'm not sure we monetize all of them the way we could.
So there are a number of boosters we will apply to our PA business, and we will retain our PA business. Yes. By the way, there's one thing I should have said because I found it out. Political polling is not a huge part of our business, but it's a huge part of our brand. And believe it or not, we talked about access to real people. When you pick up the phone and it's Ipsos or it's Ipsos Doxa in Italy or it's I&O or it's Ipsos BVA in France, etc., people stay and answer because for the first time, they don't just see the results of the poll. They contribute to the research. And so that's a huge asset. Sorry, next question.
Yes, hello. This is Anna Patrice from Berenberg. Thank you again for all the explanations. A few questions from my side.
First, on the M&A, Ipsos has historically been targeting quite aggressive M&A strategy, well, not aggressive, but ambitious M&A strategy. So what gives you the confidence that this time around you'll be able to find the good companies to acquire and integrate and at the reasonable multiples? And what do you see as the reasonable multiples? That's first questions. And there are other questions more on the growth. So during the presentation, if I look at different slides, there were phrases like commercial excellence, like, what was not the case before, what are you going to improve in terms of commercial excellence? There were mentions of advisory services that you want to develop. What are exactly those advisory services? There were examples of the B2B where the demand is growing. So can you give us more exact examples?
What exactly do you see, which categories there, which clients, which segments, or something more touchable place that will be great, and on the human interference, again, if you can give some concrete examples that AI is important, but human is also important, so if you can just give a bit more examples how you see that, that'll be quite useful. Thank you.
Okay, just a couple of questions then, so on M&A, yes, the company has been acquisitive. I'm not sure I would qualify it as aggressively acquisitive. There were two very significant acquisitions recently. The previous time, it was 2018, 2019, so there's been a string of smaller ones along the way, but Ipsos acquires in a rigorous and seizing the opportunities.
To your question on why it makes us think there are still targets out there available, part of the answer is what you heard today, is that there will be more opportunities, and it's not the first time. Laurence mentioned Synthesio already quite a way back, but we will continue to look for technology building blocks. We will use it to diversify into adjacent market, which is another one of your questions. I think the best illustration, and we're not necessarily going to list all of the potential adjacent markets we're considering, but a very clear one is going into the services that surround integrating the data and providing analytics services, the Data Integration and Analytics services you heard about. It could be an area where we find attractive targets. We will be diligent on the multiples, as you would expect, and as we have demonstrated in the past.
Commercial excellence, I can say a word here. Yes, I could give a list of what it takes to go from commercially good to commercially excellent. I've done that in my past. I've run large-scale parts of Accenture, and I've built a new business as part of a smaller company called Alvarez & Marsal. So I think I'll just tell you this is something I know we can do better. It's part science, part art, and it's probably a bit more science than art. And then I'll make sure we prove it by increasing our sales ratio, and that will prove the point. On B2B, I mean, the simple message on B2B is we have massive ability to acquire and process and make the most of responses from consumers, citizens, patients, clients, so B2C essentially, or B2C being customer or citizen.
What you heard both in the U.S. and in China, not the only markets, but two very key markets. And it's interesting, the symmetry between the two. There is an untapped market in accessing small, medium business or large corporation, for example, general services or real estate or technology buyers, the people who decide what software, what services to buy. And that's something that our clients are demanding, and there aren't many players in the market that have the ability that Ipsos will have to go after B2B as an adjacent or high-growth area. We do quite a bit of it already, so it's not totally new, but we believe we can do a lot more. And I'm not sure I got your last question on the human aspect.
AI, actual examples of AI.
Actual examples of AI. Okay.
So if you think about, we have the social listening, which is one capability, very AI-powered, right? You heard about billions of data points regularly captured. So only AI can process that. We also have a very solid brand assessment business, right? And there's quite a bit of technology that allows us to do the very large-scale global assessment of the various KPIs for our clients' brands. The ability to combine the two requires a lot of human expertise. Looking at the signals that come from social listening and how they might influence the next result of the brand tracking campaign is something that only humans can do. And then we will use that to train models, and we will detect patterns, and then the humans will say, "This pattern is relevant. This is a correlation, not a causality." So this is how we iterate.
There's no way this becomes fully automated, just no way. Others too here?
Thank you for the presentation, Emmanuel Chevalier, CIC. Two quick questions, please. If I remember well, public opinion was strategic, but you have also health, which was strategic priorities in terms of M&A at your last CMD. What is the situation today? And second question, you gave us a target of 8% EPS growth per annum from 2026. Does this include M&A?
Okay, so on healthcare, you're right. It was together with PA part of the previous story. It has suffered. It's back. So I think it is something that we have a new leader of. It is a space where, I mean, suffice to say that if you look, it mostly serves what others might refer to as life sciences, pharma, right? So that's the centricity there. And it is a very fast-growing market.
The growth of pharma is superior to the GDP, so that's one of the reasons why we continue to bank on it as one of the things that will drive our growth, so yes, healthcare and PA continue to be important to our business, and as per the strategic choice of remaining a diversified company, including in terms of sectors, healthcare continues to be a significant part of it. I won't comment on necessarily how much of it would be M&A powered. We'll see about that in due time. On the 8%?
Yeah, on the 8%, yes. It does include M&A in it.
[Marlene Faure] from Bernstein. I have two questions, please. The first one is about M&A and CapEx split. According to my calculation, you will invest roughly EUR 400 million in terms of CapEx, so leaving EUR 800 million for firepower for M&A.
What extra growth are you looking for for this M&A? This is the first question. And in terms of margin, what are the productivity gains that you are expecting for the next few years? Have you an estimation about the potential savings in terms of staff costs, for example?
Okay. So on the last question, because that's a very, of course, a very important question. Yes, there will be activities that will be automated. And therefore, there will be places where we need less people. But at the end, there are three drivers that will offset that to a significant extent. Part of it, of course, will be reflected in the gross margin and therefore in the profitability improvement. But there are three things that matter.
One, with the growth percentages we're talking about, this will allow to absorb some of the productivity gains without the impact on the headcount that you're alluding to. The second one is Ipsos is a vertically integrated company to a very significant extent. And we will continue on this internalization trajectory, which means where we have in some markets outsourced, we will bring some of those activities back in-house, which will also drive an offset of the productivity impact compared to the top-line growth. And the third thing is we're moving up the value stack in some services in terms of our positioning.
And of course, and that ties back to the other question on examples of human and artificial intelligence, that requires more people, more analysis, more predictive analysis, more making sense of data as opposed to providing the data, which we'll continue to do as our core business as well. Those require more people. So those three factors, growth, internalization, and higher value-added services requiring expertise are three of the drivers that offset some of the productivity impact. The rest will be delivered in the bottom-line numbers that Olivier mentioned.
Regarding the acquisition and the M&A, you need to have in mind that this is how we want to use the money that will be generated by our free cash flow and also by our ability to leverage some funds through credit facilities. It's very difficult, but difficult. It's opportunistic. Some years we can do big acquisition.
The following year, we'll be less. So it really depends on the opportunity that we will have in front of us in the next five years. Of course, we are working actively and we are reviewing a lot of targets every month. But as we want to stay disciplined, we just go after acquisition that really makes sense for us, either to buy new technologies that we can leverage across the group or to become the leader in one of the markets where we're operating too, like we did with BVA or I&O in the Netherlands that allows us to be today number one in this market.
And just on the two numbers you mentioned, so those are your numbers, 800 and 400. But the statement is very simple.
The majority of the EUR 1.2 billion will be dedicated to M&A and a significant part will be dedicated to investments in future solutions and in deploying the transformation we're embarking on.
Morning. David from Berenberg, just a few questions on my side. What share of Ipsos Group revenue is generated by your platform today and what level of contribution do you expect them to reach in the three-to-four years? Second question, when I choose to work with Ipsos Digital and generally speaking, the other platforms, what is your competitive advantage compared to pure software players like Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey and also against the traditional research companies such as Kantar? And the last question, on your point of view, what do the investors and the market misunderstand today about Ipsos? Thank you.
Maybe I should ask you the third one, but some might be missing a trick.
But hopefully, the ambition we have. I'll start with the last one because it is an interesting one. Our ambition is very clear: in every sector, there will be companies that embrace the changes that are made possible by the new solutions and by the new technologies and by the speed at which technology can be deployed for value creation. And those that do that faster, and those that started earlier, I'm lucky. I'm part of one which started quite a while ago, will emerge as the winners. And others might not, right? So that is, in my view, a very clear moment of opportunity for Ipsos to define the future of its industry. Those are not just words.
That's a reality when I visit, when I look, when I listen to the stories you heard about today and many others that would have made this a day and not a couple of hours. It's just very real. On the platform, the only number we talk about is indeed the volume that Andrei talked about, which is EUR 140 million of revenue directly attached to Ipsos Digital. It would be tempting, and in a prior life, at Accenture, at some point, we did disclose what was the digital revenue and things like that. At the end of the day, if I think about our business, we have 11,000 monthly active users of Ipsos Facto. So they do that because as part of a study, they use AI. So at one end, I would say, okay, how much of our business is AI-powered already today?
If I include in that every time someone uses Ipsos Facto for a query, for a fast response inquiry on our data, it's probably the majority, right? If I look at it narrowly with just one of the platforms, but the largest one, Ipsos Digital, that's EUR 140 million. I'm not embarking in the how do we measure that? Because at the end of the day, what matters is that we have more and more of the Creative Spark AIs, of the InnoLab Explorer, or the many solution-powered services. We're not becoming, to your other question, a software vendor. I talked earlier about the importance we continue to be a market research company and an insights as a services company. We're not becoming a software vendor. We will use technology and AI to make those services ever more relevant and, what's more, ever faster delivered.
[Eric Blanc, Finance Connect.]
Just a follow-up question. It's about you need to adapt your workforce to your new strategy, if I understand well. That means that we have to anticipate some restructuring costs due to this change in the workforce. And my second question is just when I heard about speed, I think that it's a great pressure on price. I am right, or?
Okay. So on the impact on our workforce mix, obviously, yes, the workforce mix will change. I believe, and I know that the board and I believe that it is part of our responsibility when some tasks are being automated to accompany with training and upskilling and reskilling the movement of our people to other tasks. So our number one priority is to reskill and upskill. Does this mean that in the margin expansion plans, there are no cost-focused measures? Absolutely not. There are in order to progress.
But the essence is both because growth, internalization, and going up the value chain provide the opportunity for more people to work and our imperative, our duty to our people to upskill and reskill. Those are the main answers to your question. Your other one on the deflationary impact of automation, maybe Andrei, if you want to take this one because that's exactly the experience we have. We benefit from having a EUR 140 million business where the value and volume mix has shown us the answer to your question.
Yeah, no, this was actually when we started the journey with Ipsos Digital. This was one of the big worries. What will happen? Because it will be a little bit cheaper. You deliver faster, but there will be some price adjustments. But what we saw was actually that clients were buying more.
So the same client would buy, and we have some fantastic examples with concept testing where the client would have bought just one concept test, but now they were able to buy one concept test, get it within a couple of days, realize it was not good enough, redo, redo the concept test, then add a fast-fact study to understand more about the client, more about the market, and then actually did a third concept test, which would have been. So that is something that definitely we see, and definitely we see also with the advertising part. And yeah, it's definitely part of the future.
Okay. We are out of time. I thank you all for your contribution, for your questions, and I'm looking forward to the next months and years ahead. Thank you.