Havas backs AI bet with €100 million a year

Artificial intelligence (AI) may have been the headline trend across most industries in recent years, but for Havas, it has now become a cornerstone of operational transformation.

Speaking at the company’s annual presentation at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on 18^th June 2025, Yannick Bolloré, chairman and CEO of Havas, outlined how AI is not only disrupting workflows but also redefining leadership styles—including his own.

Bolloré offered a glimpse into his personal use of generative AI tools like Copilot, admitting that his team finds his AI-assisted emails amusing. "They now read like it was written by the King of England," he joked.

He jocularly quipped that he has even gone so far as to create an avatar of Havas chief financial officer, François Laroze, feeding it five years of financial data! “Now, I can ask François.ai about what are the results in Costa Rica for the past three years, and compare it to India and China. And this avatar will be available 24/7,” he joked.

The levity aside, Havas is aggressively reshaping its business through a tech-centric lens. The company reiterated its €400 million commitment over four years to invest in data, technology and AI—a strategy first announced at Cannes 2023. The initiative, originally branded as Converged, has been upgraded and renamed Converged.AI, reflecting its broader AI-driven ambitions.

Converged.AI serves as Havas’ integrated operating system, connecting talent, tools and services to deliver unified marketing solutions. Bolloré confirmed, “Today, we can confirm that we will stick to our plan of investing €100 million in tech every year. We will fully train our 23,000 people worldwide.”

Converged.AI product suite is designed to be platform-agnostic, allowing seamless integration across both global networks like Google and Meta, and regional players such as TF1 and ITV. It includes Converged Activate, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to build privacy-first audiences for digital activation; Converged Measure, which incorporates analytics from Havas’ CSA unit to address attribution gaps using machine learning; and Converged Agentic Reporting, which enables real-time dashboards powered by code-executing agents responding to natural language queries. Converged AI Designer combines analytics and performance data for predictive planning, while Converged Content supports content personalisation at scale through Adobe partnerships.

Owning the challenger tag

This year's Cannes presentation also came on the heels of Havas’ successful market listing on Euronext Amsterdam in 2023, following its spin-off from Vivendi SE. The public listing is expected to give Havas greater autonomy and scope for growth as a creative and strategic communications player.

Bolloré positioned Havas as a “challenger” in a shifting landscape, citing industry turbulence, such as the Omnicom-IPG merger and leadership changes at WPP. “Our scale is just perfect,” he said, referencing Havas’ 23,000-strong global workforce. “We have a lot of agility and entrepreneur spirit, which is really defining for us.”

He also highlighted the network’s long-standing commitment to integration. “We were one of the first global networks to regroup all our different agencies almost a decade ago,” said Bolloré. Today, 93% of its staff and clients operate within this unified structure.

Havas’ creative output continues to be a bedrock of its identity. BETC Paris was recently named the top creative agency in the world by WARC. Havas also acquired a majority stake in Uncommon Creative Studio in 2023 and launched Prose on Pixels (POP), a content-at-scale unit, in Singapore this year, which complemented the expansion of Havas CX in the region.

What’s Vermeer

One of POP’s flagship innovations is Vermeer, a video production platform designed for AI-powered, high-quality output. "AI-driven culture and speed to innovation is in the centre of everything that we do as a group," explained Camila Nakagawa, global executive VP at Havas POP. She highlighted three key challenges Vermeer addresses — legal ownership of AI-generated assets, democratisation of access and training, and quality control in creative output.

"Vermeer ensures legal clarity and safety to Havas’ clients and to the agency," she said. "It can also democratise the production so that our team of 25,000 people and our clients globally have access to it."

Xavier Blairon, CEO of POP France, detailed the workflow: "You can put in the brief you get, either from the client or your creative team, describe the scene, scenarios, mood and colour... then finish with retouching. That’s how you control the workflow and your ownership on the picture." POP has already implemented Vermeer with brands like Godiva, Citroën, Valentino Beauty and L'Oréal.

Triangulating tech, AI and talent

From a financial perspective, Havas reported a 2.1% organic growth in Q1 2025. Net revenue rose 5.2% year-on-year from €617 million to €649 million, aided by scope adjustments and FX rates. This was a rebound from a 0.8% organic drop in Q4 and FY 2024.

“As a publicly listed company, we have to give a guidance to the market. So, we said we would grow over 2% in terms of organic growth for 2025… and we achieved our guidance,” said Bolloré.

While Bolloré acknowledges that tech and AI are central to Havas’ transformation, he remains insistent that human talent is non-negotiable. “Havas is clearly one of the most attractive places when it comes to talent… the fact that we are caring to each other is very important and enables us to attract the best talents on the market.”

As the broader advertising and marketing ecosystem continues to morph under the pressure of new technologies and consolidations, Havas appears to be using its medium-scale size as a strategic advantage—nimble enough to innovate, but established enough to execute globally. Whether its AI ambitions translate into sustained market differentiation remains to be seen, but for now, the agency has made its bet—and is backing it with €400 million.