Omnicom Quietly Outsourced Hundreds of Staff Who Built Its AI Platform
Advertising holding company Omnicom has continued to present its updated Omni artificial intelligence platform as a central pillar of the company's future, showcasing an updated version at CES in January.
But according to documents obtained by Adweek, in June and July the holding company quietly outsourced a large share of the engineering and product teams that built that very platform to an outside contractor, Endava. The move affected at least 468 employees across the US, UK, India and Malaysia, most of them product and engineering specialists.
In addition, around 50 US employees in Omni Platforms' Product and Engineering division were laid off on June 9, a move also disclosed through documents reviewed by Adweek.
The episode illustrates the difficult choices even major holding companies investing heavily in AI are making about who actually builds their platforms and how they sustain them: the "innovative" image presented to clients can often run alongside internal structural changes happening behind the scenes.
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