Davos 2025: Digital inclusion creates opportunity for India to lead in AI, said Publicis Sapient's Nigel Vaz

Nigel Vaz, CEO, Publicis at WEF 2025 in Davos.

Nigel Vaz, chief executive offer (CEO), Publicis Sapient, a digital consulting company, is betting big on India leading in the artificial intelligence space (AI).

"I think India's done a phenomenal job in demonstrating the public-private partnership and how digital can bring so many people into the fold, whether it's UPI and payment gateways or whether it's national identity," he said while speaking with Moneycontrol at World Economic Forum 2o25 in Davos.

"Every one of these things now creates an opportunity for India to lead in the AI space," he added.

He is focusing on Indian talent as well.

"India for us is extraordinarily exciting. It's always been a place where we've had incredible talent deployed on a global basis. Over the last year or so, we've actually become focused in actively selling into the market, starting with our GCC (Global Capability Centres) clients. So, enabling all of these companies who we've served for many years on a global basis to start to actually understand how they could think about India," he said.

Vaz added, "But not just in the context of a low-cost arbitrage model, but in almost the sapient model of the high-end, really tech-savvy engineering talent that are building some of the most cutting-edge solutions for them elsewhere. We're starting to see these teams be set up globally, which I think is giving us great exposure to the Indian market itself."

AI impact

On AI's impact, Vaz said that AI has moved out of being a technology that people are interested in and moved to being businesses recognizing AI is about enabling their physical workforce with a digital companion.

"We've gone from people actually having question marks about the value by driving proof of concepts to how this can actually drive real scale in so many different industries that we work across, from financial services to retail and healthcare and travel and hospitality, where use cases from investor analysts being made 30 to 40 percent more efficient, or IT projects that historically would have relied on lower cost arbitrage-based models now being advanced by AI and people doing work in a very progressive way. I think you're seeing the applications in either taking cost out of the business and driving growth that are starting to become meaningful for CEOs even here in Davos," the Publicis CEO said.

He also added that there is more optimism across businesses because they feel there might be more certainty in some areas, like progressiveness on taxes and in general investment in AI.

"You just saw countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, but more recently, even just last night, the Stargate announcement coming out of the United States. I think generally this bodes well. Even in organizations where the sentiment is bullish, I don't think there's an opportunity for these companies to ignore the fact that there is so much inefficiency in the way technology is deployed today, particularly in the context of their legacy environments."

AI is now seen from two perspectives-- one is in the context of growth and innovation and the other is terms of freeing up capital to be redeployed in the context of those more transformative initiatives, Vaz noted.

"You have mainframes and legacy systems in many organizations that have been there for 20 and 30 years, and it was historically managed by outsourcing to lower cost offshore geographies and managed in that way. And I think now companies are starting to realize there is an opportunity to take those legacy environments, transform them, free up capital to then start to reinvest in the more transformative projects," he added.

Consolidation in the advertising world

The CEO also spoke about the consolidation happening in the advertising industry.

"Publicis has done a phenomenal job of making investments at the right time. They acquired Sapient a long time ago, then they acquired Epsilon. Publicis' focus has always been, how are we going to continue to transform. It now is the largest holding company by both market capital and by revenue," he said.

Vaz said that on the Sapient side, they have made investments in building hundreds of millions of dollars platforms that are essentially based on an agentic architecture.

"On the Publicis side, we're doing the same thing with a platform we call Core AI on the marketing side. Leveraging all of the work that Publicis has done over the years, both on the creative side, but also on this idea of connected identity, which is essentially connecting data from our media. We're one of the largest buyers of media in the world to our clients' data in order to connect those two things so that you can get the right message to the right person on the right channel, the right device with the right context. And now with AI, what you've moved from is this traditional world of where I'm going to guess what you want," he said.