Nigel Vaz, CEO at Publicis Sapient – the digital transformation consulting arm of Publicis Groupe – says that grief for traditional ways of working is holding back CEOs and CMOs in their rollout of AI initiatives.
At the Interactive Advertising Bureau UK’s (IAB UK) inaugural AI Growth Summit in London, Vaz told Shruti Dube, UK Country Director at Meta in a fireside chat, that organisations must accept new ways of working to achieve effective AI transformation.
When asked what’s holding business leaders back, Vaz responded: “The thing that’s holding them back more than technology today is probably grief.”
“A lot of people are mourning the idea of what they’ve built over their entire careers in terms of models and ways of working,” he said.
Vaz’s response reflects some workplace reluctance towards enterprise AI initiatives and the new ways of working it ushers in, often automating tasks professionals spend years honing.
On what that grief looks like in practice, Vaz explained: “There was a huge amount of ‘this is what has made us successful for all this time’ – and that isn’t gone. But I think as people get over that, they realise that AI isn’t a technology, it’s an opportunity to reimagine – whether at a CEO or CMO level – an entire way of doing things in that industry.”
Reimagining the Modern Business
Companies scrambled to implement AI following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 and the ‘GenAI boom’. Many of these companies, who are well into their AI implementation projects, are only now starting to see where AI brings real value and where cracks are starting to show, with many realising the technology’s power to exacerbate existing problems around data, systems, or processes.
Being purposeful about where you place AI, and not putting it in a workflow for the sake of it, is critical according to Vaz, who believes businesses must recognise this “once in a generation moment” to reimagine their organisation.
“Put simply, making the irrelevant more efficient isn’t actually going to move you forward,” he said. “So I think there’s an opportunity to step back and say “Is this something we should be doing?’ as opposed to trying to apply AI to existing models.”
Vaz continued: “You have to start to rewire so many of the things that have worked so well for so long from ‘first principles’. And I think this idea of ‘first principles’ scares a lot of people because, you know, we’ve built a lot of expertise on what we’ve got today.”
The concept of ‘first principles’ represents a way of thinking that strips ideas down to their basic form, to rebuild new solutions essentially from scratch. For many companies, AI tools so far have been latched onto existing workflows, often with the incentive of speeding up tasks or cutting costs.
Vaz argues that an entire reorganisation of workflows is needed in many cases, which is often easier for smaller, more agile businesses.
He said: “I think what we’re seeing, in particular when you look at startups and businesses that are smaller and more agile, is that they don’t have as much of this ‘legacy tech debt’.
“I think this tech debt is why large organisations move slowly, but it’s also [because of] grief. It’s about our emotional resilience beyond the technology where we say ‘we’re going to start from ‘first principles’. This might fundamentally require my incentives changing, my team’s roles changing, people being reorganised in the context of how you run the business. I think that shift is a human thing. It’s not a technological thing.”
