GroupM's Aimee Buchanan on the rise of AI

Conversations around AI (artificial intelligence) have increased for GroupM, says Aimee Buchanan, CEO of GroupM Australia & New Zealand.

Global advertising groups are adopting AI faster than many analysts predicted, a form of an arms race to be on top of the heap in what’s been described as a new industrial revolution.

Aimee Buchanan told the audience at Google Marketing Live Sydney that the group had been asked questions for some time, including: 

• What are you doing in automation?
• What are you doing to get more predictive measurement?
• How are you getting faster insights out of more complex data?

"Clients have been asking these, they're just now a lot more comfortable with the answer being AI, which probably was the answer anyway, but it was just hidden a few layers down,” said Buchanan. 

“If I think about our business, we've got some amazing tools, one of them being Co-Pilot, which does 21 million optimisations a year, largely focused on our programmatic line item, which I think is where we've been really comfortable.” 

What GroupM is trying to do is take that across its entire ecosystem, because increasingly clients aren't going to want silos, but want to look at technology holistically. 

“That's our evolution - how do we bring the technology to impact what we're doing in BVOD, what we’re doing in search, what we're doing in programmatic out-of-home?” Buchanan said. 

“The future is a world where 90% of media will be touched by AI in 2032.That's not surprising when you think about the volume that we're trading programmatically and how that's going to increase, but I think the disconnect and the opportunity for us is the message - only 2% of messaging right now has targeting on it.  

“The magic spot is how we bring technology, message and media together." 

Buchanan said that there’s a “massive training program” driven on an international scale by GroupM’s global head of AI, but that the agency is also doing a lot of work structurally to address the skills around AI and technology within the organisation. 

“If we fast forward to a world where everything is digital, or largely digital, we need to be structured for that,” Buchanan said. 

“For us, we've undergone quite a massive transformation in bringing together all of that capability under the Nexus umbrella and really thinking about what the AI technology is that sits above the data spine that goes across that to enable fluidity across those channels for planners.” 

With a recent LinkedIn study revealing that Australian B2B marketers are planning to increase their use of generative AI, Buchanan believes that AI has a role to play, but one in conjunction. 

“I think if you look at some of the great work that we're seeing, ideas will still come from humans,” she said. 

“The insights and the amalgamation of information to get to that is where I think the role that AI will play, and then how we, at speed, scale that message to take out some of the heavy lifting that's currently done.  

“That's the opportunity for AI in my mind.”