Publicis Strategy Chief Warns AI Boom Could Erase Women From Corporate Leadership

Publicis Strategy Chief Warns AI Boom Could Erase Women From Corporate Leadership

As Publicis Groupe accelerates its artificial intelligence pivot — most recently through a $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp — the group’s chief strategy officer, Carla Serrano, is sounding the alarm on a parallel trend: women are being quietly pushed out of corporate leadership.

Speaking at the New York Women in Communications Matrix Awards on Tuesday, where she was among those honoured, Serrano told an audience of advertising and media executives that the industry’s vision of the future appears to be overwhelmingly male.

A Pattern Difficult to Ignore

Serrano described watching an investor day presentation from one of Publicis’ largest competitors, where the company’s “vision for the future” was delivered entirely by six white men. The experience was not isolated.

Shortly after, she entered a client pitch meeting with eight senior executives — also all white men. The back-to-back encounters, she suggested, pointed to a structural regression at the top of the industry.

The Stakes of the AI Transition

The warning carries particular weight given the scale of investment reshaping the sector. Publicis’ LiveRamp deal signals a broader industry shift toward data infrastructure and AI-driven marketing — transitions that historically concentrate decision-making power among a narrow technical elite.

Serrano’s remarks raise a pointed question: as the advertising and media industries retool around artificial intelligence, who gets to define what the future looks like — and who gets left out of the room entirely.