“Everyone at Publicis will become data analysts, engineers, intelligence collaborators, with all the information they need at their fingertips to accelerate client growth.”
Publicis Groupe made the bold statement last week in a press release and presentation celebrating their performance since last year “as they transitioned from a holding company to a platform” and charting their course for their future in the age of artificial intelligence.
Now, if you’ve disputed that claim, you’re in good company with most of the people I shared this with on LinkedIn and the artist-formerly-known-as-Twitter. But, hey, if it’s the third largest in the world agency exploitation The platform company can’t paint a bold picture, you’d be worried about its core competencies.
But here’s the thing: directionally, I think they’re right.
Empirical evidence supporting this vision emerged with the release of the Workato 2024 Work Automation & AI Index report earlier this week. Workato is a leading enterprise automation company that provides a low-code/no-code (LCNC) platform for automating processes and workflows across your entire technology stack. (Disclosure: I am their consultant and co-author of their CEO’s new book, The New Automation Mindset.)
Using anonymized data taken over a 36-month sample of 1,055 customers on their platform, they captured the truth about what companies are automating — looking at over 82,000 automations — but arguably most notably, WHERE manufactures these automations.
The big reveal in my opinion: 44% of all automated processes are built outside of IT.
Business function teams — such as marketing, sales, turnarounds — create 27% of all these automations. Non-IT project managers, product managers, application managers (looking at you, CRM managers), make up another 10%. And then another 7% of “other” manufacturers, which I’ll guess as intrapreneurship heavy users. (I have a few of these on my HubSpot collaboration team, where we also use Workato, and it’s amazing what they can do.)
It is also notable that these non-IT manufacturers — who are experts in their field, but at least organizationally not IT experts — are not simply automating simple processes in their operation. They also deal with complex automation.
“Scores 1-3 are simple, point-to-point integrations with 1-4 steps. They contain no logic and interface simple SaaS applications. Complex procedures (4-6) include conditional rules, logic, looping, data transformations, and intersection data. Sometimes they involve batch processing. Highly complex processes include a combination of SaaS, on-premise, ERP and enterprise applications. They often contain 30+ steps, with conditional rules, advanced transformations, people in the loop, and more.”
Now, I know there are some cynical The skeptics out there who believe that non-IT people using LCNC tools is a recipe for disaster. We could have a heated debate about the relative value of domain expertise versus IT expertise when it comes to implementing digital operations in a business function. But instead of rhetoric, let’s look at the facts:
If enterprise teams implementing their own automations were going to create a train wreck, one would expect to see this in the first year when these enterprise builders are less experienced. Or at least the first two or three years, right? Things would go pear-shaped and the CIO would drop the hammer, “Look at the mess these amateurs have created! We’re taking over.”
But that is not what the evidence shows. Exactly the opposite. On average, after building 31% of the automation from the business in Year 1, the organization leans into this model even more and has built 41% of the business in Year 2. By year 3 this number is up to 48%.
Please note that this is not IT against business situation, with the two different sides using competing tools. They’re all unified on a common platform—a prime example of a workflow-level aggregation platform—almost always owned by IT. Empowering these business groups is part of the IT strategy.
As Workato notes, “IT is evolving into a player-coach role: 56% of automation is still built by IT people, but IT has also been tasked with governance and guidance for the 44% managed by business teams.”
We can both have strong domain expertise and harmonized IT good governance? The evidence here suggests Yes.
The really exciting thing about it? This multi-year data from Workato only includes genetic AI results at the end of the analyzed time period. Last year, they launched a natural language pilot to empower manufacturers even more — as well as a governance framework and an academy course to teach it. A year from now, we’ll see the empirical impact, but my bet is that it will show an acceleration in both overall automation and the percentage of automation driven by businesses.
Speaking of genetic AI, the Workato report also includes interesting data on where organizations are incorporating genetic AI into their automation:
48% of use cases concern income transactions, with an additional 12% in customer support and operations. The most common of these use cases is conversational intelligence — summaries, sentiments, next steps. These were some of the most time-consuming and error-prone manual aspects of managing the customer journey. Smart automation here is clearly a huge win for both companies and their customers.
So let’s go back to where we started, with Publicis’ bold ambition.
The fact is that businesses are rapidly increasing the scale and complexity of their digital operations. They are enabling more and more people outside of IT to configure and customize pieces of these digital functions that are closest to their work. The Workato report didn’t cover the democratization of analytics directly, but a significant number of their use cases involve intelligently distributing data to enable more context-specific analytics. This may not make every employee a data analyst, but it is sure to enable many more people to use self-service analytics productively in their jobs.
Granted, Martec’s law still holds: it will take a ton of difficult organizational change to harness the innovation that this technology now makes possible. But that’s why this is such an amazing time to be working in martech and marketing businesses.
