Lewis Silkin has advised Publicis Groupe on the acquisition of Publicis Sapient AI Labs

Launched in 2020 Publicis Sapient AI Labs is a joint venture between Publicis Sapient, Elder Research and Tquila. The company combines Publicis Sapient’s 30 years of global delivery of its Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering and Data & AI (SPEED) capabilities with Elder Research’s 28 years of expertise in the multidisciplinary fields of data science, AI and machine learning and Tquila’s record of hiring and rapidly scaling new technology services practices worldwide.

Publicis Sapient AI Labs has become part of Publicis Sapient, strengthening the company’s data and AI capabilities and enabling them to develop innovative solutions across industries for a wide range of applications, such as generative AI, natural language processing (NLP), computer vision and autonomous systems.

Lewis Silkin’s team was led by Timothy Leeson, Corporate Partner with support from Ayesha Chanda, Associate in the Corporate team.

Commenting on the acquisition, Timothy Leeson said:

“We were delighted to act not only on the creation of the joint venture, but also on the buyout of Elder’s and Tquila’s interests subsequently. There is little doubt that the former informed the latter. Tech and the use of AI is becoming an increasingly important source of instructions for us. This transaction is a further demonstration of our capabilities within the data science sector at a time when we are seeing more industries utilising AI and machine learning solutions to tackle their biggest challenges.”

This acquisition will allow Publicis Sapient to provide its clients with services to transform their businesses, including workshops and hackathons to develop a data and AI vision; prototypes and proof of value use case development; training programs spanning engineering in large language model development; and collaborations with existing partners to fine tune large language foundation models.