NEW YORK, NY, February 21, 2025 – Publicis Sapient, a digital business transformation company, today announced that it has been named a Market Leader in HFS Research’s Horizons 2025 Report for Salesforce Service Providers. The report highlights Publicis Sapient’s unique value proposition as a different type of Salesforce partner due to its consumer-first mindset, noting that the company delivers strategy, design and transformation.

According to the report, a key differentiator for Publicis Sapient, which harnesses its SPEED – Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering and Data and AI – capabilities to drive clients’ digital business transformation, is its expertise in direct-to-consumer markets to bring unique perspectives and unlock new doors. The report also recognizes Publicis Sapient’s strength in technology innovation, underscoring that the company has evolved from being an early adopter of Data Cloud to being an early driver of Agentforce. Publicis Sapient has already deployed agents in two tier-one retailers and developed 40 cross-industry use cases.

"Publicis Sapient is an early driver of Agentforce adoption, which is already live for a handful of key clients, and it combines this with its direct-to-consumer relationships and expertise to drive enhanced customer experiences," said Sam Duncan, Practice Leader at HFS Research.

“This recognition by HFS as a Market Leader reinforces our unique ability to leverage Salesforce's full range of capabilities to drive digital business transformation and better business outcomes for our clients,” said Jason English, Global Salesforce Practice Leader at Publicis Sapient. “The first 25 years of the Salesforce ecosystem story was dominated by a handful of large partners who will have difficulty leaving their old habits and ways of working behind in this new age of AI. The next 25 years will be dominated by different partners who bring a brand-new value proposition to their customers, with data and AI, and customer experience as the foundation. We are proud to be a leader in this next chapter.”    

Client and partner feedback praise Publicis Sapient’s partnership mindset, domain expertise, and storytelling ability. As noted in the report, Publicis Sapient has a proven ability to deliver successful client outcomes, leveraging Salesforce capabilities. For example, Publicis Sapient created a new e-commerce business, platform, and delivery model for a leading UK supermarket to enable digital growth, while maintaining existing service levels. Other case studies include:

• For L’Oréal, Publicis Sapient defined a new commerce strategy, supported by Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and created a quicker, more efficient path to purchase for consumers across more than 60 direct-to-consumer sites in the Americas.  Agile product delivery teams were formed to accelerate the rollout of the sites. Time-to-market for brand launches has dropped from months to weeks, and many optimizations in build and release processes are now automated, resulting in annual cost savings of several hundred thousand dollars.  L’Oréal now has the flexibility to adapt to a fast-changing marketplace and can scale up or down depending on the need.
  
  
• Publicis Sapient partnered with a global jewelry brand to upgrade and optimize its Salesforce Commerce application to enable common codebase, functionality and storefront implementation for all of its e-commerce platforms, increasing release velocity and cutting migration time in half.

For the 2025 Horizons Salesforce Service Providers report, HFS assessed 19 service providers across value propositions, innovation capabilities, go-to-market strategies, and market impact criteria. The report notes that Market Leaders are those who demonstrate the ability to drive an ecosystem synergy via collaboration to create completely new sources of value, along with leveraging Salesforce’s full range of capabilities to build a 360-degree view of customers to truly reimagine the customer experience, enabling continuous innovation to help enterprises stay at the forefront of technology and transformation, driving co-creation with clients as ecosystem partners, and demonstrating compelling thought leadership that helps clients articulate their North Star. Market Leaders also have referenceable and satisfied clients driving new business models with the partnership.