Live from CES: Human-Led AI and Brand Creativity with Yannick Bolloré

0:00Before we dive into today's episode, we would very much appreciate a moment from you to make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Spotify, Spotify, or wherever you listen. along with optioning to auto-download the episodes. It really is the best way to never miss an episode along with supporting the show and the amazing team that helps me bring it to you. And while you're there, leave us a rating or review. It only takes a minute and helps more people find the show and helps us learn. And of course, share this episode with a friend or colleague who might enjoy it. We wouldn't be here six years later and still going so strong without you all, our community.

0:36So thank you for being part of it Now, on to the show. Where do you look for inspiration in applying AI in your world as CEO? I mean, you have to be curious. I mean, in life, you have to be open-minded. You have to read. You have to interact with people. You have to never take things for granted. You have to ask AI itself. How can you help me? These kind of things. But I mean, you can find inspiration anywhere. Hi, I'm Jim Stengel. I've helped hundreds of major brands discover and activate their purpose. Because when a brand's purpose is clear, compelling, and authentic, profit naturally follows.

1:14Each week, I welcome the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of your favorite brands, to speak to how their job is so much more than marketing. These leaders share their inspiration and challenges, along with how they try to build a full, healthy, and happy life in and out of the office. And it's that energy that reaches everyone they touch. And we're glad you're here to feel that energy and to learn from these remarkable leaders. So here we go. At CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show, which happens every year in January in Las Vegas, the conversation around AI often swings between hype and fear.

1:48But the most important question for marketers is far more grounded. How do you scale intelligence, creativity, and performance without losing the human connection that brands are built on? That is exactly what this bonus episode is all about. Recorded live on the C-Space stage at CES 2026, my guest is Yannick Bollaret, Chairman and CEO of Havas, one of the world's largest global communications groups. Yannick, join me to share how Havas is approaching one of the biggest transformations our industry has ever faced, embedding AI deeply into his organization while keeping human creativity, judgment, and empathy at the center.

2:24Our discussion is personal and wide-ranging and begins with asking a volunteer from the audience to participate in an AI experiment. While Yannick and I chat, Yannick's team makes a movie trailer starring our audience volunteer. We unveil the trailer at the end of our interview. We also unveil a few new capabilities from Habas that Yannick shares here for the first time. And a first for our podcast, I'm very excited to bring you into the heart of CES as we look toward a new, exciting, and innovation-rich year. Well, hello, everyone. Hello. Yeah, Nick and I are going to talk about everything, AI and agencies and brands and people and all that good stuff.

3:04But before we do that, we need a volunteer from this audience to run an experiment, a pilot while we're speaking. So I know this is very, very mysterious. Is there anyone out there who would be game to join us in this pilot or this experiment? Anyone out there? Nothing dangerous, huh? Oh, in the white jacket? Could you come forward? So join us in a minute. Say hello to Yannick. Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Is this the first time you met? I'm Yannick. Yes. The first time you met? Okay. Yes. So what is your name? Amanda Flammerich. What's your hometown? Miami, Florida. Oh. You have a football team, don't you, playing in the playoffs.

3:46You're not into that? Not really? Well, I was raised in Alabama, so I'm a Bama fan. Okay, we won't go there. So where do you work? in Philean. Okay, great. Super. Yeah. Now, this might sound like an over-promise, but this experiment will change your life forever. Do you watch Severance? No. No. Okay. Well, we're not going to put anything in your brain, are we? Scared. Nothing, nothing. So what we'd like you to do is thank you for volunteering. I'm going to escort you offstage to join some people on Yannick's team. Over there. We're going to have you up at the end of our little talk to see how the experiment went.

4:26But believe me, it's going to change your life. Okay, Amanda. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Amanda.

4:35So Yannick and I just had a tour of the floor. And so we went through it very, very quickly. And we just got back. So we're a little bit out of breath in a way. And you have been, you have not been here for many years. Ten years, ten years last time. I haven't been here for several years as well. But I want to ask you from that quick snapshot of the floor, what struck you? What made you think? What's going on here at CES? For sure. I mean, in 10 years, it has changed a lot. I mean, 10 years ago, I remember it was about Curves TV and the launch of 5G. And this year, I mean, I've seen robots for real.

5:11I've seen robots playing ping pong. By the way, I play much better ping pong than the robots. I've seen robots fighting and I've seen robots taking a selfie with me. So, I mean, it's very interesting and great energy and it's great to spend time at the convention center. Did you have a feeling of optimism going through that? We spent some time with Siemens and how they do 3D printing for recycled materials at Disney. So, we saw the paper battery company, Flint. So, I just want, emotionally, how'd you feel walking through there? I mean, it's fantastic. I mean, to travel the world, I'm coming from Europe, to travel the world and to arrive in this place where you've seen all these brilliant minds investing to create a better future.

5:53I mean, it's so energizing, so inspiring. And for sure, all these innovations, you talked about Siemens, some car companies, sustainable companies with recyclable batteries. I mean, it will change the world for the best. It's very inspiring. Now, we're going to get to some big, heavy, good topics and issues and discussion to talk about. But before we get there, I want to make this discussion very personal. So, Yannick, you have a big job, lots of people, 23 ,000 people, several roles. I want you to talk about what was your first introduction to AI? What do you remember about that? What was your first experience with it?

6:31Actually, my first experience with AI was 15 plus years ago. I was sitting in my living room with my laptop, checking on a website. and I was just starting my career at Havas in advertising. And my wife just joined me. She checked on the same website and we had different ads. Not to do any kind of stereotype. I had an ad for an expensive car and she had an ad for a dress. I'm French, I can do stereotypes. Sounds so clean. Yeah, and I realized, I mean, you have to be damn intelligent to send the right eye to the right people on the right device. And this was the first time we launched programmatic buying, and then we've begun.

7:12And 2022, like everyone else, November, I discovered Mead Journey. I mean, I come from the production space. This was a life changer. And a few weeks later, when I discovered ChatGPT in December, I said, oh, my God, this is going to be transformative. This is going to change everything. Yeah. So let's stay with that transformative idea. How has it changed your life? And I'd like you to speak as a leader, but also a human being, as a husband, a dad, a friend. I guess, I mean, if you're at CES, you are all using AI a lot. So I guess like anybody else, the first weeks I was using AI as an assistant to summarize long emails, to translate documents, these kind of things.

7:55So I get a bit in productivity, but it was not like life changer. But a few weeks later, I understood how it worked. I learned how to prompt correctly, like comprehensive prompts. and AI became much more than an assistant. It became a thought partner. And you know, when you're the CEO of a company, sometimes you're alone and you don't really know how to articulate your thinking, how to develop a clear vision for the future. And using AI as a thought partner has changed my life. And you were saying as a dad, I'm a dad of four daughters between 12 and 22 years old. And trust me, when you're a man, to understand teenage daughters, it's not always easy.

8:32So it helped me to become a better dad. which might be the most important. So you have a unique perspective into the upcoming generation with four daughters, 12 to 23, you said? 22, yeah. 22. How do they use AI and are they positive about it? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, especially the 17 years old, 19 years old are using AI a lot. And I mean, with students, it's very interesting how they use AI. Some students are using AI to do their homeworks, which at the end of the day, I think it's just a waste of time. And some others are using AI to understand, to get better. They take pictures of their exam and they ask AI to challenge how they could have done better.

9:11And when you are using AI smartly, when you're a student, you can become a kind of super student. So I really encourage every parent to try to teach their kids how to use AI smartly to become a better person, not to replace yourself. We were walking outside here, coming in, coming back from the floor and passing all these companies. Right. There's just so many, many firms here with all sorts of interesting offerings. It must be hard to be a CMO. It's hard to be a CMO, yeah. I can vouch for that. Where do you look for inspiration in applying AI in your world as CEO? I mean, you have to be curious.

9:47I mean, in life, you have to be open-minded. You have to read. You have to interact with people. You have to never take things for granted. You have to ask AI itself, how can you help me? These kind of things. I mean, you can find inspiration anywhere. So we were on a stage, Yannick and I, about six months ago at Cannes. And I host a program there for aspiring CMOs called the CMO Accelerator. There's about 60 people in the room. And Yannick kicked off that two-day program this year with LVMH. And what we did is we looked at their collaboration with LVMH for the Paris Olympics, which just blew everyone away.

10:24The numbers were incredible. It just, on so many levels, it was an incredible experience. And so they told that story about how they led that with such disruptive thinking, with such great outcomes. And you shared seven lessons, and I'm not going to get into all seven, but the first lesson you had, I think, was really wonderful. And you said it this way. Start early, think bold, and shape the rules. So I'd like you to reflect on that lesson from LVMH, the Paris Olympics. And is that a pretty good guidepost for what you're doing at Havas for getting into AI and integrating it into your company and helping clients with their business outcomes?

11:03Yeah, I think it's a good analogy. I mean, you have to start early. You never know what's going to happen, but you have to start. You have to take risks. You have to try new things. I mean, with AI, I mean, three years later, three years and a half later with generative AI, I mean, it has proven to be a success, but sometimes we fail. I remember six years ago when metaverse was the thing you had to invest. I remember we purchased the land in the sandbox. And by the way, it's a great land with a great view on the sea. If someone's interested to buy it, I can make you a big price. See it in the booth.

11:37Yeah, I can make you a great price. So you have to start early. You never know what's going to happen. Then I think the second one was ThinkBolt. I mean, you have to invest. When you feel you have something, you have to invest. And that's what we did. We have already invested 600 million euros in data, tech, and AI those past years, and we committed to another 400 million euros of investment. That's very important. And you have to shape the rules. You have to train everyone. You have to be at your best. This is how we doubled down on integration, on human ingeniosity. I think those three rules may apply to many other great things.

12:10Now, your company is, I don't think people understand how old your company is. You go back to 1835, which we were talking before. P &G started in 1837, so Havas is two years older than P &G. Did you pitch them back then? Do you have any idea? So, no, but I want you to reflect on that rich history. Do you think what we're going through now and what your company is going through is the most profound change in your history? I mean, in 200 years, 191 years. And by the way, Havas started with carrier pigeons, so it's quite a different story. They're coming back. It was the ancestor of Twitter. So from pigeons to platform, I don't know if AI is the most profound change.

12:53What I think is that it might be the most profound opportunity to disrupt the industry and to disrupt our peers and to bring more value to clients. I mean, when you look in the advertising industry at the organic growth of the big six groups, from Avast to Omnicom, WPP and the rest, in the past 10 years, 15 years, we more or less had the same organic growth, same kind of organic growth. The spread was maybe 100, 200 basis points following the global GDP. If you look at what happened in the past 18 months, I mean, honestly, we see a spread of almost 10 % between the fastest growing industry player and the lowest declining.

13:37So I think this is changing in terms of market share of everything. So it might be the most profound disruption of the industry. Maybe not the most profound disruption. So I want to talk about leadership for a moment. You have a big organization, 23 ,000 people. Many of them are in the room here. it's tough to shift an organization to follow transformative capabilities. It's tough for the clients. It's tough for you. So I want you to talk a little bit about what you and your leadership team have learned, are doing. You have this platform called Converged AI. It's your operating system to integrate all your offerings to help clients.

14:17How are you changing the work, changing the training, changing the development of your people with your leadership team to be sure all 23 ,000 people are energized by that, are educated, and are activating with clients? It's hard. Yeah, it's very hard. It's a great question. In fact, what we didn't want to do with our leadership team is to replicate what happened in our industry 15 years ago, 20 years ago, with the digital booming. At that time, and this is when I joined Havas, I was very surprised Because in the industry, I would say half of the people were in charge of digital and the other half were in charge of what we call the offline or traditional media.

14:57And those two groups were not really communicating together. By the way, it was the people below 30 years old, 35 years old were digital and vice versa. And the digital people were saying traditional media is dead, TV is dead, print is dead, everything is dead. And the traditional people, I must say, were saying digital will never work. It's just a fashion. It's a buzzword. And at the end, it was a combination of two. So what I wanted to make sure with AI, what we wanted to make sure with AI, to make sure that everyone, every 23 ,000 employees at Avast were fully trained around AI. So first, we needed to create a clear vision just to make sure that the leadership team, the executive committee agreed that AI was a revolution.

15:40And I can tell you, after one discussion, one hour discussion, we agreed that we needed to go full on on AI. We even needed to pivot to become an AI-first driven company, which is not something that we needed to take lightly. That's something very important to pivot. So we created all the trainings. We created certifications. So for instance, next week, we are having our leadership meeting with 150 leaders coming from the world to Europe, to our headquarter in Paris. And in order to attend the leadership meeting, you have to receive a certification that you are proficient in AI. No, it's been three years that generative AI is here in the market.

16:19So for me, AI has not to be something in the future. It has to be something in the present. We have to implement AI now. So we have provided people with tools, with training. And I would say that what I want to do is to have 100 % of the people becoming an AI expert. That's our goal. You have some competitors, right? Unfortunately. Do you feel like this is a great opportunity for your company to differentiate further? Yeah, I think when I look at the situation today in terms of results, Havas is the second best performer in the industry. And it's interesting because a lot of people are asking that Havas has a scale because still we are a large company, 23 ,000, but our competitors can be bigger.

17:02And with the merger of the two American players, they're going to be even bigger. But at the end, what I'm saying, when you have enough scale, it's even better not to be too big. because when you have to move in times of changes, we are more agile, more nimble. So I would say that our scale makes us by far the strongest challenger of the industry. And our clients seem to like it when you look at, and talents like it. I mean, they all love to work at Avance. And when you look at the number of clients that have joined us those past 12 months, I mean, it's crazy. I think 2025 will be by far one of the best here in terms of new business in the world.

17:39So this has really helped this AI transformation. We'll talk about clients in a moment, but I want to stay on the leadership theme. You talk about what you and your leadership team are doing with all your people and the meeting you're having, so on and so forth. But I want you to reflect a bit how you are leading differently. And how is your job and what you do and what you pay attention to and how you operate different from what it was five years ago? Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. I think I've changed the way I lead the company. since AI happened. Because when you're developing such a disruptive vision, you need to make sure that's what you're delivering to your clients, and the talent experience is just following the vision.

18:24You need to align them both. And the great thing about generative AI is that you become like not a tech expert, but you can do tech. It's very easy to understand tech, you can code in natural language, you can create things. So I would say I'm much more into details, I'm much more into products. I spend a lot of time with the team, with our data teams, our tech team. I mean, Dan Hagen is in the room, he's our chief data and tech officer. I have him on the phone every week to design the tools, to design the products we're offering to clients. So I would say I'm much more into detail than I was maybe before this new era.

19:01Do you enjoy your job more now? I love it, honestly. You know, I'm paid to go to CES to meet great people. Play with robots. To play ping pong with robots. You know what I mean? How can you not enjoy it? Okay. Now, I know your company reasonably well, and I know a number of your people, many in the audience. And I know a strong value or principle at Havas is this idea of business partnership with clients and extreme client centricity. That's how you integrate. You integrate to help clients achieve their dreams and their outcomes. So all of this work you're doing in your capability would be academic if you didn't apply it to clients.

19:40So I'd like to talk a bit, and I'm sure we have a few clients in the room, I'd like to talk about some of the work that you're proud of and interested in right now in applying AI to help clients achieve their outcomes. I know you can't talk about all of them, but there's some examples because I think marketers love case studies. We'd love to hear what other people are doing. So I'd like you to go there with us. Yeah, I think, I mean, you mentioned client-centricity. And I think this is one of the points of differentiation I have asked. Clearly, what we are here for is to create growth for our clients.

20:10We are not here to create growth for ourselves and to be happy with ourselves. We are not self-centered at all. We are really working on the best interests of our clients. And what our clients are asking for is to have, I mean, better strategic ideas, better creative craft, better media plan to reach the right audience at the right time. and at a better price. I'm sure we have a lot of clients, so we have a lot of pressure from clients and procurement on prices. And AI is really helping us to change things. I mean, when you talk about, let's say, production, for instance, I mean, we have been able to reduce the cost of production, moving from 3D to AI by 15 to 30, sometimes 50%.

20:48And I can mention a lot of clients, Racket, L 'Oreal, Renault for a car, 50 % cost reduction in production. We are doing great proof of concept. I saw yesterday Marisa, the CMO of Windham. We have done great proof of concept on AI as well. And I would say some other examples that we are doing, and I was very interested. We had a very important meeting with one of our largest clients just before the holidays. And it was all the XCOM. And they gave us, I would say, two months to prepare to develop a vision for 2035. I mean, they wanted to disrupt their category. Ten years ahead. I mean, we're just talking about next year, next quarter.

21:24Ten years. how our industry will look like in 10 years, 2035, and how can you invent a new model collaborating with us and other companies just to make sure that we will disrupt the industry. That's a good client, by the way. It's a good question. Good brief. Yeah, good brief. And two months, I mean, we really worked a lot during the past two months. I'm looking at Donna or Peter. But it was quite an interesting meeting to develop this vision and to have the time to work as a business partner, not a supplier. We like to have this direction that we work together and together, if we develop a long-term vision and if we trust each other, we can really outperform the market.

22:02Do you and your team feel that clients are embracing AI smartly and fast enough, generally? Depends on the clients. I would say our industry, honestly, was the first to move to AI very early on. And then some clients, I mean, they knew about AI, but they fear for compliance, security. If you take, let's say, the banking system or the health system. So that was a bit later. But our role, I would say, as a marketing agency is to help and to lead, I would say, is to lead our clients to the future. So that's why we're here. That's why we believe we are bringing a great value to our clients. Now, I want to talk a bit about, we're talking about your company and AI.

22:45I want you to sort of helicopter up a bit, and I want to talk a bit about the industry. So what do you think? I mean, in a way, it's a question this client asks. Ten years out, maybe we can even say five years out, how do you think this is going to change this industry that you've spent your career in? I have too. Media, creativity. If you allow me, Jim, I will answer from the lens of investors. Because as a CEO of a publicly listed company, we are meeting investors after every quarter. We do world shows. And the question today with investors, is this industry an AI winner? Or is this industry an AI loser?

23:22And basically, they invest in AI winners and they sell or short AI losers. And the question is not very clear about advertising. We have a lot of investors and people believing that we will all be replaced by ChatGPT or Gemini in terms of strategic ideas that clients can do by themselves. Advertising, creative campaigns, doing media by themselves. It's not working on that. I mean, our job, what is our job? I mean, it's to create desire for a brand, to create brand preference, pricing power. And you cannot do that without a big strategic insight, a big strategic idea. And at the end of the day, what makes a difference?

24:03The people behind the machine, I'm sorry to state the obvious, but AI by itself will not create a campaign that will bring you value. AI driven by the best people, by the best talent will make a difference. And what we say at Avast is that agencies using AI will replace agencies not using AI. for sure but at the end I believe agencies will continue to bring value to clients but then if you look at it you have to look at the threats because you look at the opportunities I believe AI personally is an opportunity for industry but you have some threats first you have the threats on jobs let's be clear for some jobs AI is getting some jobs redundant so I mean they have to adapt we believe at Hava that we can absorb the growth like say two to three percent a year without hiring new people.

24:52So that's why we are training all of people and pivoting to an AI-first company. So job. Second threat is around hallucinations. I mean, you cannot 100 % trust AI. Even if the hallucination rate is 1 % to 2%, depending on the LLM you're using, it still can happen. And when you have a big presentation for a client, I mean, you don't want to mess up and give wrong numbers, wrong source. This cannot happen. So that's why we are training our people to do comprehensive prompts to understand how to limit those hallucinations. And by the way, if I may, you need to gain experience to use AI well. You need to have developed for yourself some critical thinking capabilities.