Ad holding company Omnicom Group plans to debut its first generative artificial intelligence tool as part of a partnership with Microsoft: A virtual assistant to help ad agency employees with tasks across the advertising process such as compiling audience insights and building media plans.

Omni Assist is built on top of the company’s Omni platform. Unveiled in 2018, the platform was fashioned as a way for Omnicom’s agencies and clients to create, plan and execute ad campaigns using data. Omnicom said it continues to consider the use of Omni Assist as a beta test before rolling it out more broadly. The company developed Omni Assist using access to OpenAI’s GPT models through Microsoft Azure. 

 
The launch of the new artificial intelligence tool comes after Omnicom in February said it intended to embrace generative AI as soon as possible.

“What took 15 years in terms of digital marketing transformation…I think AI is going to have that same impact in 36 to 60 months,” said Omnicom Group Chief Executive John Wren.

Employees could use Omni Assist to seek answers regarding which consumers to target for a specific type of cleaning product, for example, or to list influencers who might be the most effective in promoting a given product within a specific budget. The generative AI combs through troves of data in the Omni platform to formulate responses.

Omnicom frames the move as a way to get smarter answers in less time, with more workers being able to use deeper data analysis.

“What that is allowing us to do is take a lot of fairly nontechnical people, people that are not data scientists, and bring data science to the desktop,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. 

Omnicom has built a steering committee to help navigate questions about generative AI. Marketers have been eager to embrace generative AI as it reaches new levels of sophistication, but the advertising industry still has concerns about issues like ethics, bias and who owns the output.

 
Omnicom client Clorox said it is willing to experiment with generative AI tools with guardrails in place and human assistance. The consumer and professional products company sees potential both in its own use of the technology and by partners like Omnicom, said Eric Schwartz, chief marketing officer and senior vice president.

“Technology is about moving faster, better meeting consumer needs, taking manual and repetitive work off people’s plates, so they can focus on higher impact work,” he said. 

Omnicom competitors such as WPP, Interpublic Group and Publicis Groupe also have made forays into the generative AI space.

“There’s so many eyes and attention on this right now. So is somebody going to wind up being a winner, and some of these are going to wind up being a loser just in terms of they’re going to be the laggard of the [major ad holding companies]? Absolutely,” said Jeremy Goldman, a senior director of client briefings at research firm Insider Intelligence. 

But he said the advertising agency companies are still navigating potential pitfalls and taking care to avoid major mistakes. 

“You don’t want to be the player who’s the first one to get dinged for [making a mistake]. You want somebody else to make that mistake first, so that you can learn from what the temperature is on that particular issue,” Goldman said. 

For now, testing generative AI will be widespread as the industry navigates its effects. With generative AI processing data on ad transactions and consumer spending behaviors, the technology has the potential to create ad concepts or predictive modeling for ad targeting. 

“That requires, inherently, a lot of experimentation, a lot of testing, a lot of practice. And so that’s what all these companies are doing now,” said Tim Nollen, a senior media tech analyst at global financial services group Macquarie. “We’re very much in an early stage of seeing where generative AI is going to take us. So this is prime testing mode right now.”