Okay, well, it's 3:00 in the U.K. We will get started. Thank you, everybody for joining today. Very much appreciate your time. Welcome to the S4 Capital Artificial Intelligence Briefing Session. AI has been a huge topic of conversation with our clients, but also obviously with you, our investors, and the analysts that cover us. That's not really surprising when you see a lot of the news flow, a lot of the consumer behavior that's been happening. We've seen reports like the recent one from Goldman Sachs that talks about AI potentially adding seven percent to global GDP over the next 10 years. Whilst there's a lot of hype around AI, there's also a lot of excitement, and we share that excitement at S4.
We wanted to take the chance today, to give you an overview of how we think about AI, what we're currently doing with our clients, and why we're excited and bullish about the opportunity that AI gives us in our industry. Today, Wes is gonna share this presentation with you. It's essentially the deck that we've been using with clients. It's one we had a lot of traction with last week in a very busy Cannes Lions Festival. We will be doing question and answer at the end of the session. If you have questions, please do put them into the chat box during the presentation, or feel free to email me, scott@s4capital.com, at the end, I'll collate them and be the quiz master and ask them to Wes.
We are recording this session, and we'll be posting it to the S4 Capital website, after the fact. With that, over to you, Wes.
Thank you, Scott. Hey, everyone, I'm Wesley ter Haar, co-founder of MediaMonks and on the board of S4. To Scott's point, we have had a lot of conversation in Cannes about AI. I locked myself into a apartment on the Croisette and really did top-to-top sessions with our clients to discuss our view on AI and really what it means for them. Before I dig into that, quick introduction. I'm sure everybody is aware of who we are, but maybe a little bit of info about how we position ourselves, I think it's pretty key when we dig into this AI sort of wave. First things first, we've been in business for about 9,000 people across the globe, in deep subject and technology people, and we position a bit, operate as a single brand, which is MediaMonks operating brand.
We run the business as a single P&L. I'll get to why that is important later on, but it just means there's flexibility in how we organize and operate around what our clients need. Then there's more of a mindset component to it, which we always call low to no ego. It really is our goal to be useful. I think it's reflected back in our portfolio. We are an innovator for the world's most innovative companies. That doesn't mean it's innovation for the sake of being shiny. This is innovating how these companies turn up for their consumers. It's innovating how they're able to organize internally.
If you look at the work that comes out of that, we just had Cannes, of course, the quality of that work is world-class, which is a reflection of both our clients and the talent we have in our teams. With that being said, what is our role and responsibility for our clients? I think if you look at the industry, at large, it tends to really enjoy talking about the future, but they're doing that because it's easy, right? You don't have to solve the future. All our role and responsibility is in the now. What's happening now in culture, in commerce, and technology, and what can we do to unlock a fair, unfair advantage for our clients?
Looking at now, there really is only one thing happening now: AI and AI, AI, generative AI, generative AI, generative AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI. It uses AI to bring AI, AI, or AI. AI. This very much reminds me of Cannes, but I do think it was the Cannes of AI platitudes. It was very top level. There's a lot of hand-waving and relatively large amounts of smoke and mirrors. I think the feedback that we received on our sessions was that it was real, right? We're calling this a race to reality. What I'll do now, and it'll take about 40 minutes, we'll run you through that story. We'll start with our point of view. The rabbit is dead. Don't worry, it will become clear in about 10-15 minutes from now.
We are showcasing how we are unlocking AI for our clients right now, right? There is real value in diving into technology at an early stage and being fast and first, but that is important because there is also some higher stakes to it, this idea of becoming an AI-first growth and marketing organization, and we will share our thoughts on what that means. Where do we start? Give a bit of input on how we are packaging this to our clients, how we are collaborating with our clients. I have a few slides that are really about our positioning and why we think this is a good moment of disruption for us. To Scott's point, he will be emceeing our Q&A after. If you have any questions, just drop them in the chat, and Scott will follow along. Part one: unfortunately, the rabbit is dead.
AI has upended the economics of advertising. Canary in the coal mine, right? Our output is easily recognizable through the lens of generative AI. If you believe that it's upending the economics of advertising, it's upending the economics of pretty much everything. This is where I would say something positive for our industry broadly. There is a bit of worry there. I would say, with the amount of disruption that's gonna hit every category our clients operate in, I think we actually have massive amounts of opportunity, right? With that level of disruption, they need creative technology, various partners to help them through that moment of change. The interesting piece here is we have to be honest about what's actually happening. If you look at technology right now, what it's already pretty good at is what I would call decoupling hours from output.
We were in Cannes. We showed my favorite ad of all time, Surfer, a Guinness ad. To the left, a beautiful piece of work, and then to the right, we saw images that were generated, purely prompted, no additional training sets, just people that understand the technology and have a decent eye for quality and craft. The big question, of course, here is: Is it perfect? My answer would be no. Would you notice it as a consumer, as you're scrolling past it in the one to two seconds you tend to spend on these types of activations? Big question mark, right? As we dug into that with our clients, there was definitely conversation in the room with some people with differing opinions, but it's important to understand what is already possible, decoupling hours from output.
An important note is every time that you look at generative AI, it's gonna be the worst it will ever be. I look at my sort of history and our history with this technology going all the way back to 2017, very bullish on it, very excited by the opportunities. I've talked about it for years and years and years. Even we were caught by surprise with the speed this went from toy to tool. This idea that there's an exponential element to it, which can be difficult to forecast. The images we see here is Midjourney, probably the most used, most famous sort of image generative AI tool. Same prompt, one year apart, right? The speed of change from toy to tool is really impressive.
I also feel we're seeing some of the same mistakes being made again when it comes to film, right? There's lots of really quirky, meme-y, AI-generated videos going around. The Will Smith eating spaghetti is a personal fave, had its viral moment. The world-eating walks is probably the Citizen Kane of AI-generated video. When I see what our team is doing, we're not that far away from what I would call end-to-end high-end film production, right? This idea that we can get beautiful composition and shots and lighting and staging from the machines already, doesn't mean there isn't some AI weirdness, right? Facial consistency, hands, always. Some of the dancing is slightly weird, but there's beautiful work already in that process. Again, this has been done by high-craft, well-trained teams, but in fractions of the time.
The question we have to answer for ourselves is: Where are we on that timing, right? If we just saw Midjourney with still imagery a year apart, is this month five? Is it six? Is it gonna take another six months, 12 months, two years? It's coming, and there's a bigger societal conversation to be had, what it means to live in a landscape where everything and everyone can be generated at the press of a key. For marketers, this becomes a really interesting element, sort of built into their thinking, especially if you think about a space where content is what we call uncapped. What does it take to stand out? Decoupling hours from output, it's there. We're doing it for our clients. If you start thinking about next, we've used different terminology here, real-time brands. We sponsored brands.
It's gonna feel like the age of assistance. This really is the original intent of digital advertising. Everybody that was in Cannes last week has either pitched this or has been pitched this. Personalization at massive scale, in real time, highly targeted, very sticky, conversational. That's possible already to some extent by the technology and to score scoring, I think that's what's gonna unlock a lot of growth for our clients and brands. It's just gonna get better and better and better. If we already have really practical ways to implement the technology now, and there's so much upside to come, why are we seeing clients be quite careful? Let's be clear, we call this the day zero of AI for our clients. There is, number one, a bit of a cynicism about what I would call hype cycles.
We, as an organization, look a bit broader than just marketing and advertising. In marketing and advertising, we sort of live and die by the hype cycles, right? Something becomes massively hyped, people invest in it, and then there is the disappointment on the other side, mostly related to reach and ROI. We just went through one of those cycles around Web3, around NFTs, so a lot of clients, until very recently, were very much in the, "Is this another hype cycle? Is this NFTs again?" The answer is no. Do you want some NFTs? No. I think this quote from Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, which is really the company why we are having sort of a cultural conversation about generative AI at the moment.
I think this quote is key: "AI is a rare example of an extremely high technology that almost everyone still underestimates the impact on." I personally could not agree more. Still, uptick, right? We're seeing some of the legal complexity block some of the clients' enthusiasm to get started. Part of that is fair, although I think we're in a moment in time, and we're seeing some really good movements. We just had Adobe confirm that they're gonna indemnify all images generated from Adobe Firefly, for instance, so you have no legal risk on that. I think two to three weeks ago, Japan already mentioned and implemented that there will be no legal risk on top of training data, right? No copyright issues. We're seeing decisions made by companies and by countries that will get us past this moment.
I think there's also a fundamental misunderstanding of what's happening, right? It's not called machine copying. It's called machine learning for a reason. Synthesizes massive amounts of information and data, learns from that, and then as you prompt it gives you its best statistical approximation of what it thinks you're asking for. It's not copy-pasting from other parts, of the web or data and training sets. Some legal gray area, we're helping a lot of clients unlock that and unblock it. The image to the right for me was a bit of an aha! moment. We've been tracking along diligently and with great excitement. This happened end of last year, October, November, and it's a bit of an AI meme now, this idea of everything in the style of Wes Anderson. This is The Shining in the style of Wes Anderson.
When I saw this, for me, it was a toy turtle moment, right? Understanding that there's refability, there's art direction, there's nuance. This is a really nuanced take on that brief from a design and production perspective. When we saw that, we went into a bit of a huddle, an overdrive on our side, and sort of sped up some of our plans. For the people that followed that, we had quite a clear message that we posted boldly on LinkedIn which is we are all in on AI. We see it as a fundamental shift in our business, and we're pledging to be fast and first. It's interesting when you start digging into what's already available, right? It has synthesized such massive amounts of input, it's not random, right? It's art directed. If you look at these images again, is this perfect advertising?
No, it's the art directorial archetypes, right? The typical beauty ad, the typical fast food ad, the typical car ad. All of that information is in the machines, right? It is in what has been synthesized. In Cannes, this was blasphemy. Cannes is the festival of creativity, and we're big fans of the festival in general, and of course, a very creative organization. There was a lot of platitudes around human creativity will never be replaced. It's interesting to see how uncomfortable a lot of our industry is, just to be honest, and though there is creativity already available, this isn't from ChatGPT, this is from another LLM. This is a great example of how idea generation is actually part of the toolset that's already now available, that our team is using continuously.
Example here, IKEA, I think, is a fun one, right? This was briefed with the worst brief you can give a creative or a creative team, which is, "We would like a viral video for IKEA." The output is actually really interesting. Going back to Cannes, I've been on enough of those juries to know that well-executed, this could pick up an award, right? It's not winning a Grand Prix, it will pick up a bronze, well executed in the right category. There's quite a bit of nuance here, right? The idea is a group of people go into an escape room, door closes, there's a voiceover, there's a time element to it, right? There's an understanding it will make something, sort of a video that's worth sharing.
The idea is you go into the escape room, and with this group of people, you have to assemble IKEA furniture to escape the room. Which is interesting, right? It even has a bit of the humble tone that IKEA sort of has, some of the friction, where people know it can be a bit clunky to put the furniture together. It's a pretty strong initial idea, right? It is not just content. Creativity is part of this process as well. Lots of really interesting elements already available. There will be blockers, though, and this is where it becomes interesting also from a client conversation perspective. Some blockers, the idea of an AI winter. We've seen a massive amount of change in a relatively short amount of time, and AI winter means we're plateauing, right?
This was big, big push. Now we're gonna have a few years where it's flat. Having been at a conference a few weeks ago, the people within the industry don't believe that's happening. They think this is the start of that promised exponential curve. The other part is what I would call the neutering of products. This 100% is happening, right? Our access combined agency brands, consumers to GPT-4, isn't to the sort of core, powerful technology that's already available, and with good reason, right? It's guardrail. There's neutering that happens to it. If somebody's super interested in that, I'll share some of the research, which is called red teaming, where you can see some of the scenarios that they're testing, which I think makes it clear that it's smart, that they're not openly providing access to everyone.
We have enterprise clients that are careful. We talked a bit about this already, but at the enterprise level, it's about mitigating and managing risk, and there's definitely a fear of the legal component. There's also quite a bit of potential ethical complexity, right? I think every brand has to have a real point of view on some of the ethics in this space. We'll see some unforeseen blow-ups, create backlash, which will calm down some people's sort of willingness to adopt. I think something that hasn't been discussed enough, but will be really key moving forward, is this idea of nation-states and political blocks. We're in Europe at the moment, Scott and myself. Realistically, we do not have a big player in the AI space, in the AI races, so we only stand to connect the downside of that, right?
The idea of potential job losses. I'm expecting super strict and quite speedy regulation in the EU. I know the UK AI Act is on its way, and I think it's rumored to be quite strict. It's actually interesting to think about some of the original ideas Bill Gates had in this space. He talked about this, I think about a decade ago. The idea that if somebody loses their job, the company that built the technology, that sort of meant that person no longer had a job, gets taxed. We'll see if that comes to bear. It will be interesting to see that be some of the tax ideas towards the OpenAI, for instance. One more note that isn't here, but just the access to GPUs. NVIDIA, I suspect, is on everybody's radar, key company in this space.
Being able to build enough of them quickly enough will actually be a potential blocker as well. Then we have something that I call the magic button problem. Exponential curves are difficult to forecast. The reality is, you can sit down today, plan your roadmap for the next six months, next nine months, next 12 months, but there's probably a company out there that's already trying to solve that problem. There are currently 17,000 funded AI startups in the U.S. alone. I'm sure a few get added every single day. They're trying to solve pretty much every problem that you can think of. There's this balancing act in where you invest your time and resources, because there might be a magic button on the way.
With all of that being said, we have actually seen this movie before, and this, of course, is Kasparov, clearly a human genius, losing to Deep Blue, a milestone in the AI industry. I think it's a good reflection of what we saw in Cannes. This initial moment when AI starts to encroach on a human endeavor and a human expertise, we instinctively really want the humans to be better at it, right? We really, really, really want the humans to win. I think it was, sort of reflected really well by Maurice Ashley, who was a commentator on this match.
I wish he could pull a rabbit out of his hat, but unfortunately, the rabbit is dead." The good news is, Kasparov won his next match against Deep Blue by working together with AI, by working together with the machine, which for me, really is the moment that we're in. What is happening for our clients? I think this was key to our conversation throughout the week. This is a massive disrupt or defend moment. Foundational change that's probably gonna hit every category, lots of new tools and technologies. There will be massive amounts of new behaviors and expectations on the consumer side. This is your opportunity to disrupt. You can leapfrog others in your category by being first into the AI space. You also need an awareness that there's an element of defending. Think about creator culture.
Over the last few years, we've seen that sort of blossom. We have lots of examples where creators are starting their own brands. We've already seen that with sort of talent at the global fame level doing the same. Those brands or businesses are eating into more established global businesses. AI, to an extent, superpowers that behavior, right? It democratizes to an extent, being a global organization. Think about a major creator being maybe three, four years away from being able to produce a full Hollywood-level quality film for a fraction of the cost, or a triple-A video game for a fraction of the cost, right? Disrupt or defend is really the framing of what we see happening next. We mentioned day zero earlier, managing and mitigating risk. This is what we're seeing.
Again, to Scott's point, we're sharing this in full transparency. These are the conversations we're having with clients, not a pitch. We're helping our clients get past a lot of these initial day zero worries, copyright discussions. What are the ethics of this? How do we ensure that there's a brand safety point of view? What does it mean from a technology and info security perspective? Who are the partners that we should be working with? What does it mean for our operational model? These are big, meaty questions that especially global enterprise clients are sort of getting into, and luckily enough, we're part of those discussions. The exciting thing is in day one, this is gonna be about consumer experience. This is gonna be about the original intent of digital advertising. I think there especially, there's massive opportunity.
If we're in day one, I think part of our role and responsibility when we talk about now, is how do we start unlocking AI now for our clients? We use the term unlock for a reason. The irony is, for all of the conversations we had about AI in Cannes, I'm sure for all the conversations everybody on this call is having about AI, weekly or daily, very few clients have a budget for AI, because it started hitting the radar for many of them in March or April. A big question that we see with our clients is they need to innovate, but they still need to run the day-to-day. We have solved that for them. We call it synthetic media. We're going into our clients, existing clients and new.
We're looking at where they're currently spending. By using synthetic media, we're helping them unlock time and money. That is time and money they can reinvest for some of the structural, foundational change that needs to happen. An example of this is, for instance, photo shoots. Synthetic media is really about a spectrum, right? Sometimes we go full virtual production when it comes to image generation, where we're setting up and we're shooting, and we're crafting a composition in something like Unreal Engine. After we have the composition, we use AI to scale out and create all the variations of that one composition. That's a typical sort of way that we're seeing this come to bear. What that means is we're replacing out-of-pockets, right?
In many cases, a lot of travel when it comes to content production or sets with computing power, and of course, also some manual labor with computing power. What does that mean for our clients? It means we can get their work done faster. Key in e-commerce, making sure your product is to market as quickly as you need it to be. Great for social, where you can be more immediate in your responses. We've been able to move to cheaper, right? We can do the work faster, and because of that it 's often also cheaper. It also creates the opportunity to create a lot more output. That is interesting. Again, it goes back to almost the original hypothesis of digital advertising, right? If you add more stuff, is it better? I will spend a bit of time on that after the next case video.
We'll look at a quick case for HP w here you can see that spectrum in play. We're still doing an actual shoot in the studio, shorter shoot than we would normally do, but then, pre-production, post-production is using our AI-ready pipelines.
When it comes to AI we're not playing catch up. We've been preparing for this moment for years. With the power of enterprise-level generative AI, we built an unprecedented production pipeline for the OMEN Back to School campaign, which allowed us to explore new creative territories and deliver our signature top quality faster. No expensive VFX, no motion capture, no animation work, no limits to what can be imagined and executed. Some results are pretty cool, it wasn't until our team of experts worked their magic, adding their expertise and craft, that the whole thing really came to life. This changes everything. Innovation is in our DNA craft is at our core AI is our brand new superpower.
A great example of that spectrum, how do we replace out-of-pockets? How do we replace manual labor with AI to make sure we're unlocking time and money for our clients? This is a big question, and actually, I think, important as we start thinking about what the sort of future upside of AI is. Is more better? Again, this is an original hypothesis of digital advertising, right? If we have more, we can be more personalized, we can target more, we can be more relevant, more contextual, and we've always, sort of, hypothesized together as an industry that that drives your conversion. What can we do if content becomes uncapped, right? If we can create endless amounts of content for only incremental additional costs. One thing we can start doing is really doubling down on regional relevance, right?
We know the importance of that. This example is an interesting one. The pictures we see here, the talent we see here, is fully synthetic, right? This is fully generative. We don't recommend necessarily for our clients to do so, because we think there are some ethical discussions to be had, but it's a good example. In this case, normally a client might do a shoot with a few models, maybe two or three, and it's relatively generic. If you think about Asia-Pacific, if you have one generic talent for that market, it also means lots of markets aren't happy, right? China isn't happy, Japan isn't happy, Korea isn't happy. In this model, you could do a single setup, press a button, and replace all of the talent with generated talent.
What we do for our clients is we actually take pictures of real people, right? We define who their preferred talent for each market is. We take pictures in that market. These people aren't traveling to expensive shoots. Doesn't even have to be in a studio. We need about 80 to 120 different pictures. We can train a model on the model, it means you just have that person available for all of your generated output at the press of a button. Important to change talent contracts for generative output, massive upswing in the ability to create regional relevance. Another element here is this idea of audience affinities, right?
If we're creating imagery and content and messaging and copy that speaks to what somebody has an affinity with, it's gonna allow us to be more in the moment and more contextual and more relevant. Often, those audience affinities and segmentations are relatively top level, right? Sports and music. With this, why not have, instead of 10, 100? Why not 1,000? Why not have an image for every person that you're connecting with and that you're talking to? Again, uncapped allows for that level of relevance in ways that just literally were not possible before. Then, of course, real-time. I think one of the more exciting areas where we're seeing a lot of movement is in e-com.
This idea that you can be conversational, that you can ask for changes on the fly, that you can see the imagery and the clothing as it would look great on your body type. There's massive amounts of opportunity here, and again, uncapped, right? We can now create real-time responses in ways that honestly just weren't possible before. How are we actually using this? We can talk because this gets posted on the website as well. We can talk in closed-door settings about the actual clients. We've anonymized this. For a big sports brand, for instance, we're using synthetic to scale out e-commerce, right? We're doing the regional relevance here in ways that just weren't possible before. We're also optimizing what I would call the warm funnel of e-commerce.
We've had this conversation with quite a few of our clients now. 50%, 60%, sometimes 70% of e-commerce assets aren't optimized, right? We have a client that sells the same product on Walmart and on Target with the same imagery, even though that we know those are completely different demographics. Start thinking about the Netflix model, right? Where they have 10, 20, 100 versions of the same thumbnail, and as you interface with the thumbnails, they'll start building a profile of what type of imagery you like. We can start doing that in e-commerce and push up the engagement and conversion without a massive explosion in costs. Lots of upside in synthetic e-commerce. Same for social. Again, this is now something that is solved.
There's this massive issue called creative fatigue, slightly inside your baseball, but what it tells us is there's a moment in time when your ads start losing their ability to impact because they've been seen too many times, and you need to switch them out. All of the ad platforms have massive amounts of data, and they can sort of predict when that's happening. Solved, right? We can create those ads without a bunch of incremental costs, making sure your media spend keeps delivering, which, of course, isn't just great for clients, but is also really great for the big ad platforms. Synthetic CRM, we're actually Salesforce's Marketing GPT AI partner. We'll be showing up together at Dreamforce to discuss that in more detail.
Personalization in copywriting, personalization in email headlines, just this idea that we can be iterative in how we talk to consumers and create a level of stickiness and really a focus on lifetime value, that wasn't possible before. Again, you're not exploding the cost by doing this, but you are driving much higher ROI, increased engagement, better conversion, synthetic CRM. The last one, we are constantly working on these and implementing them with our clients, is what I will call synthetic production. This really is at scale. We saw a great example for HP earlier. Just going through the spend at a global scale and seeing where can we start implementing this type of synthetic production solution. Again, to free up time and money to start investing in other areas of the business.
Often those are AI related, although I think in general, marketing spend is quite consistent. There's other opportunities to invest as well. Okay, that's AI now. Quick time check. That's great, right? In every conversation we had, there's a, I would say, almost a why aren't we doing this yet reaction, which is, I think, a great sort of motivator to just start going. I think it's really important for organizations to start doing AI-related work because they need to get a level of comfort with it both from an operational perspective, a legal perspective, just to make sure they don't get left behind. Soon, this should be table stakes. This is where I'm always a bit careful when I talk about this type of moment.
If you look at DCO, slightly insider baseball, but that's called dynamic creative optimization, which is really automation. It should also be table stakes. It's been in market for a good 8-10 years, we can still see it have limited impact at the enterprise level. While there's a lot that can be done, there is some complexity to getting the full upside of AI in more complex organizations, which really brings us to AI first, and I would say some of the more interesting conversations we had in Cannes. How do you become AI first? This is important to frame. Let's look at the digital landscape. We're saying this is the next transformation, digital, and I would go as far as to say that there are three big beats.
There's AI, there's iPhone opening up, sort of age of social, and then there's the start of the commercial internet. Of course, there are lots of smaller ones in between. Social is a good example. Programmatic is a good example. The great news is that with each of these shifts, companies like ourselves ended up with more work on the other side, right? Anytime you hear Scott talk about this, or me talk about this, you'll understand some of our bullishness. It's interesting to think about what this means for marketers, right? I think the iPhone had massive impact from a societal perspective, right? Completely changed the way we interface with our friends, with others, with the world, with ourselves, and did that in a relatively short time frame. I think AI is gonna have similar amounts of societal impact, but the timeline will be a bit longer.
We'll see if I turn out to be right on that. From a marketing perspective, I think it's bigger than iPhone, and to me, it is commercialization of the internet. Although we had these conversations with one of our technology partners in Cannes, and they said it is as big as man harnessing fire. You might have to put a fire emoji just offscreen. Why is this important to talk about? If you look at the general length, the median length, that companies were in the top 500, Fortune 500 pre-internet, I think it's somewhere around 86 years. Post-internet, it goes down to about 18 years. Post-AI, sub 10, I think is realistic. Massive moment, and this is what is important for our clients, right? Everybody plays in this now space, which is generalist, generative AI.
Everybody has access to the same things. There's no specific understanding of your brand, and there's no awareness of your needs. What needs to happen next? We call this predictive and prescriptive, a brand AI that only you have access to. It's trained on your brand, it's trained on your datasets, it's built for your needs. Part of that sits in AI models. A lot of it sits in pipeline. Predictive and prescriptive is an important note here because it plays into some of the tenets of AI, and that's really part of what we're doing with our clients. How can you mirror some of those tenets to have the maximum upside of it? Predictive and prescriptive is about the circularity of AI, right?
If we have well-structured datasets, and we're constantly feeding that dataset with insights that we're getting from what is now a much broader way to talk to your consumers, right? You have more ways to talk to them, and more real-time ways to talk to them, so you're collecting more information. We should be able to get predictive on that dataset, right? We should be able to start thinking about where do we invest more of our money, which channel is more important. It becomes more real-time. You can already see that reflected in our latest media mix modeling product, which is AI first, which really leans into this, right? 100 different models fighting against each other to give you its best prediction of where your money should go. If you can start predicting, you can start being prescriptive. This is the circularity, right?
Does that mean it starts setting up the initial version of a media plan? We had a lot of conversations in Cannes about the disruption media will go through. If it starts being predictive, can we be prescriptive around the type of creativity or the type of ads or the type of copy that's gonna resonate, right? Circularity. Some other elements that are important, we talk a lot about the idea of the compound effect, right? The speed of change and how AI builds on itself, which is really why we're pushing for our clients to be fast and first. Then I mentioned adversarial just now, the idea that it doesn't have to be one AI figuring something out. Like, you can have 10, you can have 100, fighting it out for the best results.
Which is really interesting when you think, for instance, about one AI workflow that generates ads. You'll probably need a brand safety and a Q&A AI checking those ads in real time. Predictive and prescriptive. I thought this was really interesting. This is a single person's view, so you have to take it with a grain of salt, of course, but somebody at Google had a memo leak. I thought the memo was really interesting because it opens up a big question for our clients, right? The take here was the barrier to entry has dropped. A single person with some free time and a beefy laptop can do things now that used to only be possible to do in the size and strength of a big technology company like Google. The messaging was: Do we still have a moat, right?
What is our moat? That opens the question, in an AI world, what is a moat for our clients, right? If everybody's accessing the same things, what do you have that only you have that can make you stronger? That's your data. Thinking about building an AI-first marketing organization starts with the view on data, and already we have something called Design to Learn. If you look at our industry, I would say the most underleveraged part of our industry is the amount of media money that gets spent and how little we learn from it, right? Massive amounts of money goes out the door. Everybody's focused on the campaign results, but there's very little learning that gets generated outside of that campaign.
Honestly, still to this day, a lot of that data is in real time, a lot of that data is locked in reports and dashboards that don't really have meaningful input on your next campaign. We already have an internal methodology, which we call Design to Learn. Really, in the age of AI, that becomes Design to Machine Learn, right? The idea that this isn't just about having data or a data lake, it's about having constant streams of fresh data, right? As you're pushing your media out in the world, what can we learn from a brand performance perspective, right? What's converting? What's creating lifetime value? Where does our growth come from? Really making this a constant optimization process. If you think about the age of AI. Actually, this was more popular in Cannes.
The last decade or so, I would say we've lived in a marketing advertising landscape where it was about optimizing, right? There was a big idea. All of the eggs were in that basket, so you had to optimize that single big idea, across all of the channels and all of your funnel. That type of optimization was incremental, right? It was, let's use maybe testing, let's change the color of a button. There's a different call to action. If you think about AI, what it opens up is not optimization, but maximizing, right? The idea that you can do more s o why wouldn't you have that adversarial model, right? Instead of having one creative idea, we know for a fact that if you have six creative ideas in market, your cost per action will drop by about 40%-60%.
There's a cost prohibitive component to that, right? We're getting to the point that that's no longer an issue. Instead of optimizing a single idea, why not maximize and do six? Why not do 10, right? This is really the shift, and my honest assessment, and this was a big conversation we had in Cannes, and again, Cannes is the cathedral to the big idea. I don't see that model beating this model at any scale, because if you can start putting millions of models to work, it really becomes a smartest pipeline wins conversation, right? This is a very simplified overview of our pipeline. Very simplified overview, but the key components here are, there's an analytical piece to it, right? This is about data. You have first-party audience data.
We're talking about first-party creative data, this idea that we're creating more ideas, more output, more personalization, more targeting, more information and learning, and we're feeding that back into our own data set. Of course, we're training it on our brand history, our product, anything that we need. That data set will be the most valuable thing you have in the age of AI, right? Only you have it. If it's ready for machine learning, you can keep building on it, and it will be a massive lever and unlock for growth. The generative AI piece allows you to respond to that insights in real time, try new things, new campaigns, new content, new experiences. It's really about activating the insights your analytical data set now provides. Quick time check.
Eighty percent of all conversations that we have around AI sort of center on three things. One is efficiency, cost savings. The other one is job anxiety. Then the third one is the question: Will it kill us all? I think it's important to also look at what we have called always imagined, right. We're in a creative industry. We're excited by the opportunities that we have because of what channels open up, what technology opens up. We can now do things that literally weren't possible six months ago and I cannot stress that enough. It is magical, right. I don't think it gets enough attention. This is a very small example, but I wanted to show it because it happened last week in Cannes. We have a party on the Wednesday.
We always have four M's in the name, MassiveMusic and Media.Monks organize it together. Instead of doing prom night, we organized prompt night, and we had an AI photo booth. I have never seen a line this long for a photo booth, because it was doing something that nobody had seen before. It was creating perfect, beautifully creative pictures of groups of people dressed and done up as if they were going to a '50s prom, right? Massive line. Lots of people coming up to us going, "Is this a product? Can we get it somewhere?" This is just because this wasn't possible six months ago. People haven't seen it before, and that, to me, is some of the excitement, right? We can get to some of that magic that has to be part of digital advertising, especially.
I'm gonna show another piece of work, called Kiki, which, again, is something that literally just was not possible six months ago. This is a MetaHuman that takes in real time, speech, right? Listens and can translate that speech to three different sign languages. Why is this interesting? Why is it important? Number one, you could scale it up and scale it out, right? Everybody could have their own version of it. It's also important when you think about breaking news. It's not difficult to plan for sign language if the Olympics are happening, but it is difficult if there's breaking news or some type of warning. This opens up that information distribution to everyone. We'll do a bit of voice over here. I won't show the whole video, but, we'll make sure it's on the site as well.
Again, this sort of responsiveness, real-time, personal slash personable is a real shift change in what was possible in digital and digital advertising until very, very recently. We have these three sign languages now, but discussions about extending. You get the point. If we go on, some other ideas, right, some of the prototypes and test projects that we're doing with clients when it comes to consumer experience. Using AI to do live photo design, right? Not everybody that's creative is also a designer. The ability to do that via voice and conversation now, and actually pick that up, unlocks massive amounts of opportunity for consumer engagement. Conversational marketing, I think this is really interesting.
If you talk about the hype cycle that we mentioned earlier, probably about six years ago, a massive hype cycle hit our industry. It was about conversational marketing. It was about bots. It was really this idea that we could sort of move into what I would call age of assistance. The technology wasn't quite there yet, right? A lot of us have one of these machines at home. We use it for some things. The conversational piece is still a bit light. We can see that working now. We've actually been in this space for a while now. This is a ChatGPT 2 implementation, including a deepfake with The Weeknd for Spotify. Beautiful piece of work that picked up a lot of awards last year.
This actually is a new engagement that we had launched about two weeks ago for the Champions League final. If anybody is watching is a Man City fan, congratulations. This is Del Piero, famous ex-player, had an amazing career with Juventus. He was your ambassador, your second screen at scale, right? We had a conversational engagement on WhatsApp, where trained on his tone of voice in his career, you would be able to chat to him in real time about what was happening in the match, 'cause we pulled in all of the match data as well. Massive amounts of people having these conversations at the same time. Super sticky, right? We're seeing this type of marketing really explode at the moment. Lots of interest in the beauty industry, especially.
We seem to be first when it comes to these types of engagements, often. Okay, breathe. This is a message to our clients as well, right? Everyone is late, and that's just down to the speed of change, right? I think everybody got hit with this somewhere between the last three and last nine months, and is really trying to reframe what their plans are. The main message is, don't be too late, right? You have to get started. I think that's where we are a key partner, right? Unlocking, unblocking, just being very practical on where to start. What are we doing with our clients? We'll take on pieces of content production, right? This is an easy place to start creating some space that you can reinvest. Could be big photo shoots where we take out-of-pockets out of the production.
Could be just lots of e-commerce content that needs to be created. Relatively easy to start and just get going, right? Gives our clients and these organizations a real sense of what's possible quickly. What should you invest that in or reinvest that in? What does your brand or product feel like once you experience it through AI? What is the consumer experience when you look through that lens? We're doing a range. Some of it is pure ideation, some of it is all the way with go-to-market pilots. Another element, our end-to-end model, including media and content creation and data, where we're not going for the optimization of a single idea, but the maximization of what AI unlocks, a bake-off, right? There is no way a human-only model or even a human plus automation model beats that structure, right?
We're seeing a lot of interest here. I think there's a general consensus that the media part of our industry is probably a bit hesitant to embrace this for understandable reasons, but this is really where you start unlocking not just a bit of an efficiency play, but a real return on investment, which is key. Then it's about starting to lay your AI foundations, right? The idea that to be ready, to be machine learning ready, you really need a data structure that allows you to build your own data set. Again, that data set will be the most powerful part of your opportunity for growth, right? Because you have that, nobody else has it. You're no longer playing in this generalist generative AI space, right?
You can actually get ahead of what the rest of your industry or category is doing. That's our discussion with clients. To Scott's point, this is the discussion we have every single day. Really interesting conversations lots of practical, let's get started with now, lots of more strategic discussions about how we get to next. The conversation that we also had in Cannes with a few analysts, especially, is about the why S4 discussion. We talked a bit about this in our last earnings call, why S4? Number one, we've been in this space for a while. This image was not prompted. This is me before I had to worry about generative AI. We've always known this is a way to decouple hours from output, right?
It means we've had teams on this for a while now, and it means we already have AI-augmented workflows in both our talent communities and our end-to-end teams. What does that mean? A talent community like our art team uses these tools at an extremely high level of fidelity, means they can do more work with the same amount of people. Films, we just saw the HP example, right? A lot of post and pre-production already hits these pipelines that are continuously being optimized. These playbooks are part of the largest training exercise our organization's ever done and is still doing. We're fully committed to getting everybody in our team to be the best trained crafts person or tech person or media person in our industry. We've also been able to solve key challenges, I think, sooner.
Again, this is very much what we're getting back from our clients. We're fast and first in many of these things, and this allows our clients to be fast and first as well. A good example here is MonkGPT. When we were reading about companies in our industry or outside of our industry blocking access to ChatGPT because of privacy constraints or worries, we already had our own MonkGPT up and running. Everybody has access to it. There are actually some really interesting implementations in Slack, right? We have it as a brainstorming tool in Slack, for instance, which is working really well. We also have what we call an AI workforce, which we're building out. Turing.Monks is a great example, which is really an analyst on top of data, right?
You can ask it questions, it gives you insights that would normally maybe take you a bit more work to figure out, because you now have this sort of analytical AI doing the heavy lifting. We're partnering with all of the leaders in AI for the enterprise level. We have great access to startups as well, very committed to the main players. We are in their feedback loops. To my earlier point, with Salesforce, we're their Marketing GPT launch partners from an AI perspective, partnerships with NVIDIA, Google, et cetera. We're a little more agnostic. There's been a lot of sort of press push around solutions that really focus on a single tech stack.
Our position tends to be a bit more agnostic, very bullish on what all of these companies are doing, but we're pulling it together in ways that we think are best for our clients. Then we end where we began. Single P&L, why is this important? If you look at generative AI, the easiest way to think about it is, hey, there are some cost savings because we can decouple hours from output. That's fine, and I call it base reality, right? That's clear. Let's do that. If you want the upside, if you want to be able to leapfrog, if you want to be able to defend, it needs to be data, content, and media as a single pipeline. Of course, that gets infused and powered by technology stack. Our company is structured this way.
We're able to deliver this to our clients, in ways that are really difficult to do in a fragmented landscape of a bunch of P&Ls and a bunch of labels and a bunch of brands deciding what the AI strategy is. This is part of our foundations. We've been really clear on why that is. I think in AI, that just becomes even more important. With that, we're done, and I think we have about half an hour for some questions. Thank you. If anybody has questions in general, feel free to ping me or Scott, but we'll have Scott be a Q&A MC for a bit.
I am, yeah. Thanks, Wes. That was great. Really appreciate it. We've got quite a lot of questions. I've had a bunch of emails, but there's a few on the chat as well, so I'll read a few out. I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Some of them are quite general, and some of them are pretty specific.
Okay.
One of the questions is around. Obviously, technology is a massive part of this. Do the tech-led providers, so the more the sort of consulting companies, systems integrator companies, are they better placed to guide clients through the AI transition?
I have two points of view on that. One is we have a very strong tech services offering, which is. It's a bit more practical, and it's really about getting the pipeline in place. I do worry, a lot of messaging is this is digital transformation 2.0. I think you have to be a bit careful with where you invest because of the magic button problem. It's gonna be extremely easy to build something for six months, for nine years. Digital transformation work often took two years, maybe even five. The space moves so quickly that I would be careful. You can actually see that in some of the initial moments, right?
People training an LLM on massive amounts of their own data, which is expensive, knowing that actually using existing LLMs with a much smaller training set for a fraction of the cost has 98% of the same output, right? I think it's, I think it's technology-enabled, and you need to build pipelines, but it isn't necessarily the let's start a whole new digital transformation wave, which I think the big consultants are gonna focus on first.
I guess following up on that, some questions around whether we intend to sort of deliver and generate AI platforms ourselves, so that Marcel from Publicis has given us as a kind of comparison there. Do we intend to sort of go down that route ourselves or partner? Also on the partnerships, you know, you touched that a little bit. Can you talk a bit more about the partnerships we have? There's a comment that the Salesforce one sounds a little bit more go-to-market focused than some of the other ones.
Correct. The answer is... Full transparency here, I think a lot of, and I went through this, right? I remember that I had this moment in November or October of last year, where I'm like: It's happening. What's next? The instinct is to build a bunch of stuff. The reality is, with all the startups already in the space, the magic button problem is real, and I talked to several clients. All of them will have a very smart AI leader in their organization very quickly, right? A few of our clients already have. They're not gonna be tricked by a ChatGPT, a white label ChatGPT with your agency logo on it. They just won't, and they shouldn't be. It's a pipeline discussion, and it's tapping into the best of what's there. That's what we do.
I don't think it is the smartest use of resource or time to build a lot of bespoke work, knowing of the open source space and how much activity is outside of that. Flip side of that is, yes, we have pipelines, right? Pipelines that allow us to connect data and comb aggressive media in ways that are AI first, but all that's powered by open source and what's in the landscape. The second part of that question?
Around the part, partnerships, yeah.
Go-to-market. I'll start with the Salesforce one. 100%, it's go-to-market, right? What I think differentiates us for a lot of our clients and also for our partners, is we're already doing the work, right? We have the cases. We're able to show upside against these cases. This isn't, let's start doing some AI work, right? For our partners, that's exciting because it means they can be in the market faster as well. With Salesforce, it's very much a let's go to market together and start getting our clients the upside of using the technology in the best possible way. If you look at the partnership broadly, we're a little, which I guess, you wouldn't expect us to say with Sir Martin as our bullhorn, but we're a little less PR-worthy than the massive network.
A lot of that messaging is on very deep partnerships, and I'm personally interested to understand a bit more about some of the commercial models. For us, we have the same relationships. We just are a little more agnostic on how we implement the technology in the best possible way for our clients.
Great. I'm getting a lot of the sort of similar questions around the, I guess, the impact on the business model, if you like, something we've discussed quite a lot. It, it's early days, so in some, in some respects, it's just hard to say. A lot of questions around, if this is making things faster and better and cheaper and easier for clients, then I guess two things. One, won't they just simply in-house it and do it themselves? Two, won't they just simply focus on this as a opportunity to cut costs, which shrinks the addressable market for agencies?
Commercial model. Yeah, we have had a lot of conversations around that. We're spending a lot of time with procurement teams on the client side to understand how this moves, right? I do think there's gonna be changes where it can't just be time and material models, but there's opportunities for other commercial models as well. We are testing quite a few of them, very close relationships with procurement teams that are also interested in figuring out this space. I don't think it necessarily decreases addressable market, but there's a theoretical component to that, right? I think there's a consistency in what percentage of GDP tends to be spent on marketing.
We shouldn't forget the amount of opportunity that's now available in extended consumer experience. We shouldn't forget that if marketing makes people money they tend to spend more marketing money, right?
Mm.
It's sort of a bit of a compound effect. I do think there's gonna be winners and losers in our space, but I think that money just distributes to the players that are best suited to help clients as this happens.
Yeah. Quite a few questions, as expected, given the audience on this call around, if there are sort of efficiency opportunities for us, does that mean massive increases in margin for us? That's something we've discussed as well before, but probably unlikely, right? Given that clients, you know, expect some level of transparency and sharing on that.
I would say there's a few pieces to that. One is, this wasn't planned, but I was surprised by it as we went through the week in Cannes. We are probably at our scale, so if you look at the industry, sort of, we're top 15. It sounds like nobody else was being clear about some of the realities here. We've been clear that if we're generating savings and efficiencies, part of that goes back to the client probably sooner than other people seem to be saying. There's definitely internal efficiency opportunities still from a workflow perspective. From a headcount perspective, we've also been clear to our teams.
I actually thought that was another really interesting part of Cannes, where there was a lot of, I won't name names, but I was at an event where there were amazing AI demos from a technology partner, then the messaging was always: "But it won't replace people." You're like, "Sort of will, though," right? We've been really clear to our team, we have a commitment to making sure everybody's the most well trained. We are gonna focus on being AI first in market and really being at the front lines of what that means from a commercial perspective, 'cause we believe we can do more work with our existing team and our existing structure.
If that doesn't quite balance out, I think Forrester had a report out a week and a half ago that said our industry headcount will go down about 7.5% in the next six years. Right? It's a reality of what's gonna happen. Our goal is to come out on the other side with a lot of home questing and commercial growth, and our team understands that that's the goal.
On the talent side, it's a good segue into that. A few questions around that. Is there enough talent in the industry that understand this, know how to use it? You know, how much training is needed and what are we doing in that regard?
Massive training exercise on our side. What I wouldn't say surprised, because we know that there, we have great teams, but a lot of the innovation starts at the grassroots level, right. It's people that understand their area of expertise really, really well and can attach it to what AI now makes possible, and sometimes that's an efficiency piece or a speed piece, and sometimes it's a creative opportunity. A lot of what we've been able to do is because our teams are very excited by the technology, and there's a lot of grassroots sort of ambassadorship.
I would say not that dissimilar to what happens with other technologies, that a great subject matter expert that also knows the technology is miles ahead of just a great subject matter expert, but also miles ahead of somebody with little subject matter expertise that uses technology really well, right? The combination of both, really looking at some of the work that our teams are doing is astounding.
Actually, an interesting question here and something that has come up before with some of the product bases that we're seeing from the big platforms, but there's a criticism of, sort of generative AI advertising, that it's banal and derivative. Are these tools that are better suited to SMEs, doing sort of social media or search or whatever, than high-quality creative for large enterprise clients?
I think it's easier to start at the SME level, also because of risk. I don't want to speculate. I'm sure there's one million conversations on it, but if I'm a big ad platform, I would feel a little less excited about launching generative AI into enterprise-level business, right? Because one mistake has massive consequences, where at the SMB or SME level, it's a lot easier to, I guess, make some mistakes. I think it's too easy to say it's derivative or banal. Like, it's a discussion, right? Is something derivative because it can only create based on what it already knows? There's a lot of work out in the world from an advertising and marketing perspective that is pretty straightforward, promotion work, promotional work, activation work.
I think what I saw in Cannes, I think this is sort of the rabbit is dead. Every time we think about AI, we look at the very best humans can do, and then we go, "It can't replace that," right? It's not gonna write a Shakespeare play, although, a few years from now, maybe, right? Can it start writing a PDP page copy? Yes. Right? I think people struggle with the spectrum, right? It's they're like, It can't do that absolute peak, so it can't do anything, and it's just not the reality of the technology. My take is, it's a great tool. You'd be, you'd be crazy not to use it, right? Because if you don't, somebody else is using it.
I can tell you for a fact that we won't win that in the mid to long term.
I've got a few, quite specific legal questions, so I'll preface those by saying you're not a lawyer.
This is not legal advice.
Anyone should get their own legal advice. Exactly. One of the questions come up a couple of times. If we do get sort of clients down that pipeline you described of becoming AI first, and we're working sort of very closely with them, they have their data in an AI model, and we're helping them with that, where do you think the IP will sit on that? Who's gonna own that IP? Is it gonna be the client? Is it us? Is it the tech platform? How's that gonna work?
The output?
Yeah.
I don't globally, it's gonna differ, but if you look at the U.S, for instance, the current copyright law means anything that's created purely by a machine or a computer can't be copyrighted, which I don't see as something that holds, but case law is quite slow, so we'll be two, three years out before I think that's completely formalized. There will be discussions around if you're pushing stuff out into the world, how important is it that what you're pushing out is copyright or IP defensible? That might mean you need to make some changes in how you go through the pipeline. Those changes could be marginal, though, right? Just to be clear, this is a pipeline and people story, right? Smartest pipeline wins, smartest pipeline gives you the upside of uncapped, right?
If you have uncapped content, how can you make sure that actually drives your business in meaningful ways, in e-commerce, in CRM, et cetera. There's people in that pipeline that are subject matter experts, right? They're making sure that that pipeline is running at the very highest level. There's reinforcement components to it, which are other important sort of AI tenants. Yeah, the copyright and IP conversation on output is gonna be different region to region, and depending on how important you find it, that an ad output on a Facebook wall has that defensibility, you'll have to change some of your process.
Okay. Couple of questions on sort of timelines and timing, and again, you know, these are, I guess, our views, and we're quite bullish on what the opportunity is here. Apparently some of the other sort of people in the industry are really cautioning around the fact that this isn't gonna happen at scale anytime soon. You know, what's your view on that from? You know, I know you've locked yourself in a room last week with clients. You're spending all your time on calls with clients going through this right now. What's your view on that, given the conversations you're having?
I don't think it happens at the same speed everywhere. Like, there's parts of our industry that will be extremely slow, and there will be parts that will be faster. Same will go for sort of industry categories. There isn't a major client that hasn't decided that this is one of their top three areas of focus, right? In every conversation, there is a follow-up that sits at the C or exec level, because everybody has decided that this is key. If you would ask me why you're hearing some of that trepidation, if you haven't figured it out yet, and there's massive disruptions to your existing business model, you're gonna want it to move slowly.
Mm.
Right? We're probably more bullish because we actually see the upside, so we're part of making the move fast. Right? That's the reality of at least my takeaway from Cannes.
Yeah. I think that links into my next question, again, had this a few times, but, given that the sort of the partnerships and tools are all out there, and we'll all be able to use them, how do we create the moat for ourselves at S4, and what's gonna allow us to differentiate ourselves from our competitors in this area?
I think in the current landscape, I would say there are three things. One is just fast and first. Speed is key, right? If you are able to be the key AI partner to your clients and race to reality, right? Being real on what's possible right now, not defensive. That, to me, is the biggest push that we're putting in place now. 'Cause being an AI partner to clients actually opens up the aperture to the whole business, right? We literally have sessions where we go through all spend of our clients, and we go, What can we consolidate? What can we optimize? What can we do to make this more efficient, right? For us, fast and first is key, and we're getting that reflected back from technology partners.
Second piece is talent and team, commitment to training, no fear, being very aggressive in our messaging also internally about that we're all in on this and what that could potentially mean. I found some of the messaging kind of a bit patronizing when it came to that, to be honest. Our organizational model, the single P&L. Because we've talked about it so much, I think sometimes people start seeing it as a tagline versus an active choice that makes things possible, that are just really difficult to execute elsewhere. We're in a room every single day of the week with an integrated team, right? We're not in five different agencies with different P&Ls, deciding who or fighting, who gets to decide what's next, right?
This is an organized, top-down mandate that's completely integrated. Those three things I would say are the current moat. I think there are really interesting conversations that we're having as well around data sets. I had a conversation with a big creative festival, not Cannes, right? Training one of our AI workers on their creative data set, right? What is good advertising? What has already been done? This idea that you can use interesting data sets and build your own AI workforce on top of those data sets. Some of those data sets are the ones we have, some more data sets that we're sort of building into our offering.
I think just having meaningful understanding of how to use data in a way that impacts your business in ways that sort of make you more distinctive.
I've had a few questions around the media side of things. I think you touched on it, a fair bit in your presentation, but really, you know, there was quite a lot of conversation, I think, last week in Cannes, around what kind of disruption could happen in the traditional media planning and buying approach that agencies have right now. Do you have a view on that?
Martin has the most point of view on this. Why trust a 25-year-old media planner when you can go with the predictive and prescriptive model? The reality is, the media part of our industry at large has sort of skirted even automation at massive scale. Still a massive amount of manual labor, which is not what we focus on, right? We've been automation from day one. We've been very focused on sort of productizing that. I think this just changes the footprint that you will need to service clients at global scale. Scott, you can talk more about that complexity, but that's tough, right? Because a lot of revenue and margin sits in those services. If you have to change that, I think that's gonna be tough.
Yeah, I think it's another opportunity for us in that we, you know, we have.
Yeah
Pretty different approach on the media side. We come from a programmatic, performance-based approach. We use lean into technology already. I think, I think as things change and AI becomes more commonplace and disrupts some of the much more manual approaches that are prevalent in the industry, I think it's a great opportunity for us. That actually speaks to one of the final questions I've got here on the chat, is really around headcount. You referenced that Forrester report around sort of potential reduction of 7.5% over the next five years. I think there's a Goldman Sachs report out there about the impact it could have on the wider job market.
I think these things are all quite speculative at the moment, but are we seeing anything yet from a headcount perspective? Do we have a strategy around what the implications could mean for our business?
For our business, we're clear efficiency targets against every talent community and end-to-end team. Again, talent community is a skill set, like our art and visualization team. End-to-end team is like a pipeline, like film production, for instance. Efficiency targets, that efficiency target really translates to more revenue that we should be able to handle with that team or potential headcount reductions if we don't manage to sell into that additional level of efficiency. Again, we've been non-patronizing about this, which is key. I think you have to be clear when something as fundamental as this happens, you have to be clear to your team what's happening and what the plan is. That could go either way, right?
If we, the initial signs are pretty decent, but if we bring in more work against how we've reframed our business to be AI first, we can do more with our existing team, based on those we call it ratios, or AITO, sorry. If headcount goes down, it's a reality of what's gonna happen. I think the 7.5% that Forrester had, they talked to a bunch of people. There's the component to it that is difficult to predict. Every time something as impactful as this happens, jobs go away and other jobs come back. I, at our size, I'm quite bullish that we're well-positioned, right?
In general, 9,000 people, I think, is a great size for what's about to happen. It's difficult to predict what the new jobs will be two years from now.
Yeah. I had a couple of questions around, again, partners and technology. you know, are we ourselves gonna have to invest heavily in technology, buying in, lots of NVIDIA chips, or is that, is that something that the sort of the tech companies are more focused on?
Yeah. It'll be stiff competition to buy NVIDIA chips, that's for sure. Realistically, the way we've always operated is... it's actually, it's interesting, if you go back to the original positioning that we had when we launched S4. It's the best partner to sort of build on top of the technology landscape, right? We had seven sisters or 12 companies that we really focus on, and then making sure we use that technology to combine to connect our clients to their consumers in the best possible way. That's not something that I see changing. I think there's investment in team and talent. There's investment in some of the pipeline components.
There'll be investment maybe in specific model training, but the concept of being massively invested or overinvested in GPUs is not in the plan.
Great. Well, I think that pretty much covers the questions we've had so far. If anyone else does have questions, please feel free to email either myself, Scott@s4capital.com, or Wes directly as well. We'll be happy to answer them. This is obviously gonna be a topic that continues to engage a lot of you, and we will continue to provide content and opportunities to discuss it. It's something that's moving very quickly. I mean, I think the irony is we did cover this in our FY 2022 results presentation. We had a session that Wes did, introducing the topic, and no one asked us any questions or had any interest in it, and that was only three or four months ago, and now it seems to be the thing that everyone's focused on.
Hopefully, you got a good sense today of our positioning, what we're focused on, why we see this as such an exciting opportunity. Again, we'd be really happy to engage with you further on it. Feel free to contact us, thank you very much for your time, Wes. Really appreciate it.
Appreciate it.
We'll be in touch. Thanks a lot, everybody.
Have a good one.
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