Scaling Technology at Omnicom: Craig Cuyar on Post-Acquisition Transformation

And now you look at technology and it pervades every aspect of the organization. I think every organization today is a bit of a technology company that does a little bit of financial services or does a little bit of retail or in our case does a bit of professional services. Welcome to Technivation. I'm your host Peter Hai. My guest today is Craig Kuhiar. Craig is the Global Chief Information Officer of Omnicom, the world's largest marketing communications and advertising holding company, which earns roughly $25.5 billion annually and is operations in more than 70 countries. Craig leads technology strategy and execution for the company. With a career spending nearly three decades as a CIO, he's shepherded large IT transformations across companies like Cushman and Wakefield and Realogy franchise group prior to his current post, which has been in for about a decade now. I look forward to exploring what it takes to sustain large scale transformation over time from leading through major acquisitions and operating model shifts to balancing centralized platforms and deeply embedded business technology leadership. I also look forward to hearing how Craig and his team leveraged data, AI, outsourcing, other trusted relationships besides to serve global clients as a unified enterprise at unprecedented scale. Craig, welcome to Technivation. It's great to speak with you today. Yeah, thank you Peter. Good to be here. I'd love to have you take it from where I left off in my very brief introduction of Omnicom to describe the business you're in. Not only a fast growing business, but one that has recently grown considerably as a result of an acquisition as well. Describe your business if you would. Yeah, so thanks Peter. Omnicom is a holding company for hundreds of agencies around the world, hundreds of entities around the world. We specialize in advertising. We have PR companies. We have ethnic marketing companies, media organization. We have healthcare companies, sports marketing, sports entertainment. And all these companies are under one Omnicom umbrella. We are a holding company that has been transforming over the last few years to that of an operating company where we're taking a much higher role in delivering our operations in a much more centralized and strategic manner than we had prior. Yeah, look forward to hearing more about that. Talk a bit about your role as chief information officer. As I mentioned, one of multiple you've had of consequence and in a long tenure, not only this one, but prior ones as well. I've always admired Craig the extent to which you've taken on these roles and been with them long enough to introduce change but to see change fully through. Talk a bit about your current post to CIO if you would. Yeah, so I think that's the, that's what keeps me coming back, if you will, to the job. When you look at an organization, you have the opportunity to see the change, influence the change, and then ultimately look back and see the impact of that change. That's quite rewarding. And doing so with a team of trusted people around you, who enjoy doing the same, sustained change over time in the ability to recognize the value of that change and actually see and take credit for that as a team. I think that's quite valuable for us as an organization and that's how life's been the pinnacle and the testament of my career. Speaking of change, as I referenced a moment ago in November of 2025, your acquisition of Inter-Public Group took place, was finalized and it's something that gives you some data advantages as you've talked about to me previously. I'd love to have you talk a bit about what excites you most about the combination of these, these organizations and the integration to come. Yeah, so if you look at the, the integration with Inter-Public Group, so we close the deal, completed the acquisition the day before Thanksgiving. And then the real work has begun. We now have 75 different integration plans across the globe. We're looking everything through from our SIM and SOC operations within the cyber function to tenant consolidation, to data migration, consistent policy across the organization. All these are changes. Those changes ultimately require a significant investment in organizational change management and changes in our business practice as well. So when you talk about Peter, some of the benefits of the acquisition, we're looking at, say, first of all, we get scale. And when you look at scale across an organization of our size, there are some tremendous benefits. The data and the scale of the data, we have the ability to manage that in a much more different fashion. We have the ability to leverage that. The first party data that comes through that acquisition gives us an ability to tie that first party data to some of the proprietary platforms that we have already with an on the column and give us an end-to-end solution, if you will, all the way from ideation of a creative campaign, the data used to support and enable that, all the way through to the transaction with our Flywell e-commerce platform or digital retail commerce platform, giving us the ability to actually understand what's happening all the way from the funnel, all the way through consumption and conversion at the end user customer. Very interesting. Another major activity of 2020-26 is a shift towards some outsourcing as well. Can you talk a bit about the rationale behind that and the value you hope to derive from so doing? Yeah, I think when you look at outsourcing anything, it's a true understanding of what your core competencies are and are not. We're a global marketing, advertising, set of entities. And when you look at the things that we are differentiating for in the market, I would say nobody has come to an on-the-com entity in the 10 years I've been here because we have a better data center strategy than another provider or we have, you know, we have it built to manage the email platforms that, you know, two cents per user less per month than one of our competitors. They're coming to us because of the advantages we have and the differentiation we provide in the market, our proprietary knowledge, our proprietary platforms. And when you look at the outsourcing, the outsourcing, we employ, give us an opportunity to drive costs down and to leverage capabilities from a provider who has the scale and does this for a living. Well, we have the opportunity to then reinvest our capital, our time, our people, you know, in our financial capital into other areas that are differentiating for a market, for us in the market and giving, you know, us the ability to drive that differentiation and enable more forward facing technology solutions. Very interesting. You mentioned earlier some changes in your own operating model as you think about this massive diverse organization. Talk a bit about how you think about the balance between what's, how your services are delivered centrally versus in a federated fashion and how that's evolving across time. So it's been evolving over the last six to eight years where we've moved from more of a holding company to that of an operating company. And in the IT organization, Peter, we've been building out the shared service facilities and our capabilities in multiple markets around the world. We've been leveraging more outsourced providers and it's giving us the ability to focus more on the front of the office applications and needs, giving us the opportunity to drive more technology innovation and enablement into our lines of business. So from an organizational perspective, we have what we call now our connected capabilities, which are the lines of business across the Honecom that would be the immediate division, the PR division, the advertising division, healthcare division, and all of those entities have a connected capability, CIO. So they have a line in business, CIO, that ultimately reports into me, but they have the individual opportunity to focus on the bespoke or the specific needs of a healthcare collection of companies versus an advertising collection of companies or even the media organization. That model has evolved over the years, it has given us the ability to put more focus, more emphasis on the lines of business. While we are standardizing, consolidating, and ultimately outsourcing the areas that are non-different, trading to us in business. So some more of our shared service or core service areas. And then that centralization also has given us the ability to drive consistency and reliability in the product and services that we are delivering. Very interesting. And as multi-national clients increasingly engage across multiple business lines that you referenced, how do you think about your team's role in ensuring that there is a common experience that they have as they interact with multiple parts of Omni-Kam? Well, the key for us is they're all part of the one organization. So it's one large technology function, all with common mission, common values and common culture. And that gives us the ability to ensure that we're all working together as a team. And we have the ability to deliver those services in a consistent manner as one function. Greg, you talked earlier about the ways in which you've been excited about the data advantages you're going to reap as a result of the integration of these two massive companies. I'm curious as you parlay those forward, how AI is going to come into the picture as itself an additional source of value. So we look at AI in a couple different areas, Peter. One, some of the legacy AI and machine learning that we've done across the organization. If you think about, we're one of the largest consumers of data from a organization like Google. You know, a very large spend with Google on an annualized basis. We buy a lot of data and services from Google on behalf of our clients and for use in our value at those services and the data, leveraging AI and ML across that data. We've been doing it for years in terms of being able to build predictive models and be able to build capabilities that enable us to target messages to the appropriate consumers at the right time on the right device. So that is all machine learning AI that we've been doing for probably 10 or 12 years now. When you look beyond that, you get into generative AI. And in our organization, we spend a lot of time looking at different LLMs, how we leverage in AI across the organization. The force multiplier, if you will, is we have the ability to leverage that across multiple entities at the same time. And doing so in a manner where we can actually provide for testing of those models to see which one gives us better results and how we then in turn feed that back into our organization across different units, giving them an opportunity to learn from the activities in the efforts of others. So when you think about the agentic space for us, it's about building the framework, building the guard rails that give our entities the ability to leverage agentic AI and deliver our services. So we could start at the beginning with how do we actually define the customer and what is the creative blueprint that would be necessary to instantiate a model or to deliver a service to our clients. That can be done in a modem fashion, right? With the agentic AI, generative AI, we can hand that off into an ecosystem where we have agents that will take that creative blueprint. It will actually generate the content. So it can generate the audio, generate video, I can generate the graphics. And then we can actually take that content in the overall ecosystem and hand that off to a set of agents that will look at that content and actually use the data sets we have and produce synthetic data to actually do some of the A/B testing and some of the synthetic market testing in that creative to actually predict which one will perform better for a particular consumer audience. We can then take that and hand that off to another set of agents that will actually take that output that is predicted to perform better in a market than other creative output. And we can use that to bump it up against the demand side platform to see what inventory is available in the market inventory on a particular website. Next to a particular journal, next to what inventory is available for consumption or for purchase in the super balls coming up. We can actually look and say, what inventory is there? How is it priced? You can take the algorithms and you have thresholds identified where we can actually then get the values within a certain range. The agents will automatically purchase, ensure that space and actually place the content. And then hand that off to an ecosystem where agents will take and look at the content and the actual values derived and the actual placement of that content, the actual consumption and actions taken on a consumer based on that content. And then feed that all the way back to the beginning of the model where we're going to look at them and say, OK, here's how it performed in the market. Well, what changes would we make in the front end of that ecosystem to enhance? Soon, this is the AB testing. Go back in and predict what we would do differently with that output, that creative output going forward, and then run it through the overall ecosystem all over again. So remarkable examples you've been giving Craig. And clearly, this is not just an IT-only story. As you've just described, the value derived across Omnicom suggests that it is all hands on deck and a really broad usage of artificial intelligence writ large. And I wonder, as you've thought about introducing this and educating the populist tech and non-tech folks alike, how you've gone about that process? So that's a great question, Peter. We've actually taken a step back and said, let's separate the two populations of staff, the technology organization from the rest of the organization. And when we look at the technology organization, we built learning pathways, some of it leveraging proprietary training, some of it leveraging LinkedIn training. And we've built development programs for all of our staff. We've made it mandatory. We've built it into every one subject of some setting, the technology function at the very basic level. Everyone in the technology function should understand how to use a technology because throughout the organization, they are called upon by others. We're trying to learn the technology, and they need to be a resource. They need to be an evangelist, and they need to be able to use at a basic level the technology. So regardless of where you sit in the technology function globally, everybody has a basic level of understanding because they're called upon for their information and their support across the organization. At a higher level than that, when we get into the specific individuals who are driving the change in the organization within the lines of business, there are additional learning pathways for them to complete. So they have a much more elevated level, if you will, of the AI tools, generative AI, and the ethical implications of their use. When you look at the broad organization outside of IT, we have done a similar format where we've developed proprietary training for roles. So it's all role-based training within your organization. If you're a copywriter, here are the things you can do to leverage different technologies and apply generative AI in your specific role. If you're an art director, here's how you could use it in your specific role. If you're in the media organization, and you need to develop a strategy for media planning where you need to actually place media, here is the tools. Here's how to learn to use the tools in a non-threatening environment. We're looking at it and saying, we have about 80% of our organization that would be impacted 20% by generative AI. And on the flip side, we have about 20% of the organization. That would be impacted 80% with the advent of an introduction and use of generative AI. The 80% impact is 20%. Those are the normal information workers. Those are people that can benefit from things like co-pilot and chat GPT and Google Gemini, where they're incorporating that into their daily work environment. The 20% were 80% impacted. Those are developers. And we have about 6,000 developers around the world. And when you're looking at their ability to write code using athropic cloud code, the cycle time for producing code could be significantly reduced. So we're looking at that population, saying their job, and their role is impacted through the use of AI. Fascinating. I love the ways in which you've differentiated the potential use and value derived from this. I'm very interesting to get your perspectives on a Craig. I wouldn't also ask you if somebody who has such a wealth of experience as a CIO and multiple large-scale organizations, as you think about your earliest days as a CIO, compared to those today, I'd love to have some reflections from you about how much more pervasive technology and a role like yours is of influence today relative to your first days as a CIO. So that's also a very good question, Peter. So my first days as a CIO, I was a CIO in a health care organization. And I can remember putting in the first internet access lines and giving offices we had access to the internet, the docs using it for nothing more than checking stock portfolios. And ironically, in the home health care company, we would have home health care nurses that would use the first email system that we put into send email messages saying, hey, meet me out back for a break in 10 minutes. And obviously, it's become much more pervasive, much more widely used over time. But I think-- I mean, you look at where we are today, with where I was earlier in my career, or earlier in my career, technology kind of stood out. And it was separate apart from the rest of the organization. There were fairly few discrete news cases for technology. And now you look at technology, and it pervades every aspect of the organization. I think every organization today is a bit of a technology company that does a little bit of financial services, or does a little bit of retail, or in our case, does a bit of professional services. So same title, but really very different job. I find that so interesting. You've carried the title in multiple places in multiple industries of consequence. But really, the job is so substantially different. It is. And it changes every year. If you look at cyber security or data privacy, I mean, things that we had in a prior role at the Cushman Awakepield, the cyber security landscape has changed dramatically. The data privacy landscape has changed dramatically. Some cases has become a little more fragmented. in that you've got CCPA in California, you've got GDR across Europe, Union, you've got PIPPLE in China, different data privacy regulations. And in you operate in these jurisdictions, you have to be a consumer of all and a provider in all of those markets. So you have to abide by all of the different data privacy regulations. It becomes challenging and the challenges keep changing as we evolve. One of the things I really appreciate from our past conversations Craig is how you have reflected about the how your career is unfolded in the decisions you made on where to go. You've mentioned to me that you follow people across companies and even at times accepted less compensation for a period because of a strong relationship you have with somebody and the kind of experience you knew you would derive that the learning itself was more than compensate over the long run. I'd love to have you maybe add to that some of those reflections as you think about some of the difference makers across your career that have led you to this remarkable position you currently have. Yeah, I think it's about understanding what value you can bring to the organization and what value you can extract from it as well. I'm ever learning. We're all ever learning. And when you look at the opportunity to learn from others, have good strong mentors. Yeah, I would follow a good strong mentor to another organization because I know how that individual works. They know how I work. And when you have a great symbiotic work relationship that's trusted, you tend to follow people and continue learning from them and with them in multiple organizations. And if I flip that around Peter, I have, you know, in my 27 year career as a CIO in different organizations, I have a few folks in my current staff who have been with me for 20 plus years. We've just gone from one organization to another because we have that trusted relationship. And you know, they know that the model that I have is, you know, as the CIO, my role is to recruit, retain and motivate the best art talent we can, give them guidance and direction and get out of their way and let them do their job. So we hold them accountable, but they're fully empowered. And that is motivating. And when you can, when you can inco-ocate that into your culture, you know, people will follow and want to continue doing that from organization organization. And I love the way in which you sort of pay that forward. The great lessons you've had from those, those above you who have been of influence in the way in which you're now paralleling that to the people that you were influencing reports of yours and people who have been teammates across multiple companies. I wouldn't also ask you, how do you stay current? But what do you read that you or listen to as the case may be that you'd recommend to others that help you get a sense of or a gauge of where the business world is headed? So for me, staying current is not necessarily coming from reading one particular journal or listening to, you know, a particular podcast. For me staying current is part of the give back that I believe in. And Peter, I don't know if we've talked about this previously, but I actually am an adjunct professor. And for me, you know, serving on a graduate faculty and giving back into a profession to help build that next generation of CIOs or IT leaders, that gives me an opportunity to maintain currency. When I'm teaching in a program where the minimum number of years for acceptance in the program is 10 years of work experience, you know that the conversations you're going to have in the classroom are going to be pretty rich based upon people's experience. And having to lead and engage in those conversations means I've got to be quite voracious if you all of, you know, the appetite for learning, the appetite for reading and understanding more about what people are doing in their respective organizations, be able to bring it in the classroom, talk about it, and have good discourse and learning that occurs. Yeah, that's really great. It's a northeastern university, I believe. Yes. Yeah, that's, and I love that thought that the first you give, but also there's so much that you get from, from you at the time spent with your students. Thank you so much for sharing some reflections on that. You're probably welcome. Well, Craig, I want to thank you more generally speaking. What a dynamic and fascinating conversation and reflective of the remarkable experience you've had at multiple organizations, but of course, with a special emphasis on the current post at OmniCom. Thank you so much for sharing a bit about your view of where the company's headed and by extension, where the world has headed as well. It's been a fascinating, fascinating to hear you speak. So thank you. Right. Thank you Peter. Appreciate the time together.