--- --- # Ask an Expert: Nigel Vaz, CEO, Publicis Sapient  ## **Why Enterprise AI Is Key to Building a Resilient Business** #### **Q: In your experience, what qualities do businesses that have a successful AI investment strategy share?** **Nigel Vaz:** Strategic AI use that spans different areas of the business is what actually creates long-term value. Many organizations understand that AI is going to be transformative and already have pilots happening across different parts of the enterprise, but they struggle to scale those pilots in a way that creates real impact. The organizations that are actually seeing value are reimagining what they are trying to accomplish so they don’t just make the irrelevant more efficient. They’re rebuilding decision-making, workflows, and customer experiences around intelligence, and thinking carefully about how to infuse intelligence into business decision-making. Organizations need to move beyond broad-based AI applications and be thoughtful about where they are making capability investments centrally, while enabling functional investments tied to very specific use cases. Those investments also need to be linked to very clear objectives and measurable business outcomes. And while technology plays a critical role, so much of the work that we do is _people and products_. We have a lot of people with deep industry expertise working with clients to help them reimagine processes in the context of what intelligence and AI can actually enable when AI is threaded through the fabric of the organization. #### **Q: What are the most common challenges companies encounter when operationalizing AI?** **Vaz:** One of the biggest challenges organizations face is a lack of alignment around what their AI priority actually is. A lot of the value comes from having real strategic clarity upfront about where value gets generated and what problems the organization is trying to solve. Many companies want to jump directly into AI, but they’re held back by fragmented datasets, legacy systems, and decades of tech debt that prevent them from moving quickly. The organizations making progress are moving beyond consumer-grade AI and thinking about how to embed enterprise-grade AI into core business processes. That requires connected data, modernized systems, and platforms that can orchestrate intelligent agents across the enterprise. The challenge is not simply deploying AI tools. It’s creating the infrastructure, governance, and operating models that allow AI to scale and create measurable impact. #### **Q: How do Publicis Sapient and its AI platforms enable enterprise-wide scaling and optimization? What makes Publicis Sapient different from other technology platforms?** **Vaz:** Publicis Sapient has three platforms that address different enterprise challenges: Sapient Slingshot, Sapient Bodhi, and Sapient Sustain. Sapient Slingshot helps organizations modernize legacy systems and accelerate the software development lifecycle. Sapient Bodhi enables enterprises to orchestrate intelligent agents and embed AI into core business processes. Sapient Sustain helps organizations move toward AI-enabled IT environments through autonomous monitoring and self-healing capabilities. These platforms can operate independently or together as a common operating system for enterprise AI transformation. Our platforms are first and foremost enterprise-grade platforms. They're designed to solve problems in complex, diverse, and often highly regulated enterprise environments. They were never consumer platforms. Most of the AI companies now with fantastic valuations grew up in the consumer AI space. They grew up with very little experience in how organizations like banks and retailers actually work. Our platforms are designed to not only take into consideration the legacy and the tech debt these businesses have, but also the complexity around their processes and operating models. #### **Q: What’s your advice for leaders who are looking to build confidence in AI among employees?** **Vaz:** Effective enterprise AI solutions are designed to work with humans, not replace them. This human-in-the-loop approach that combines the technology’s capabilities with human intelligence is crucial to powering enterprise-wide outcomes. AI brings speed and efficiency, but it’s people who ultimately govern the technology. To build confidence among employees, organizations need to show how AI can help people perform better in the context of the work they already do. Too many employees hear about large investments in AI as infrastructure or tools but don’t actually see the value for themselves. And when AI is implemented responsibly, it builds value within the organization. A nurse at a hospital can use AI-powered devices to manage multiple patients and not only track their data, but also alert caregivers when a patient is trending in the wrong direction. This allows practitioners to take a proactive, more effective approach to care, and can help them care for more people. #### **Q: What’s one AI use case you’ve seen recently that stood out as genuinely impactful?** **Vaz:** A large healthcare organization was looking to modernize millions of lines of legacy COBOL code running on decades-old mainframe systems. Traditionally, that process could take close to a decade. Using Sapient Slingshot, the organization was able to modernize those systems and accelerate migration to a scalable, cloud-native architecture in less than three years while reducing modernization costs by 50%. We’re seeing similar levels of impact in other areas of healthcare as well. For example, in pharmaceuticals, advertising rules vary significantly by country. AI can help organizations navigate these differences by embedding geography-specific compliance requirements and guardrails directly into the system before content is generated. Using Sapient Bodhi, we helped a leading pharmaceutical company transform its content workflows, resulting in 75% faster content production, up to 45% cost reduction, and significantly faster time-to-market. #### **Q: When you’re explaining AI transformation to someone outside of tech, how do you usually frame it? Is there an analogy you come back to?** **Vaz:** The Iron Man analogy is one I definitely use a lot. The technology alone is just the suit, and people alone have limits. The power comes from how you design the two to work together. These intelligent systems amplify human capability, and the output is significantly greater than just systems or people on their own. Our belief is that AI works best when it augments human judgment, and in many cases, that is where you’re seeing exponential value.  [Learn More](https://www.publicissapient.com/) Enterprise AI: Nigel Vaz on Business Resilience ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/branded-content/publicis-sapient/ask-an-expert-nigel-vaz-ceo-publicis-sapient/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/branded-content/publicis-sapient/ask-an-expert-nigel-vaz-ceo-publicis-sapient/"},"headline":"Ask an Expert: Nigel Vaz, CEO, Publicis Sapient","datePublished":"2026-05-28T19:08:28.537Z","dateModified":"2026-05-28T18:47:08.705Z","description":"Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz explains how enterprise AI scales impact, modernizes systems, and helps build resilient businesses.","url":"https://time.com/branded-content/publicis-sapient/ask-an-expert-nigel-vaz-ceo-publicis-sapient/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[],"articleSection":"","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/branded-content/publicis-sapient/ask-an-expert-nigel-vaz-ceo-publicis-sapient/","name":"Ask an Expert: Nigel Vaz, CEO, Publicis Sapient"}}]}] ```