How Omnicom Uses AWS to Cut Infrastructure Costs 90% and Build an AI-Powered Marketing Platform

Omnicom operates one of the world's largest marketing and communications networks, serving over 5,000 clients across 70+ countries with 75,000 employees. The company had accumulated 9 separate data centers over decades of organic growth and acquisitions — each a siloed operational burden requiring dedicated infrastructure management. Teams spent excessive time and budget keeping infrastructure running rather than developing campaigns and serving clients. Managing 9,000+ data sources while processing 400 billion daily events across fragmented infrastructure created both cost inefficiency and analytical limitations.

The strategic challenge was twofold: eliminate the operational overhead of legacy infrastructure while simultaneously building AI capabilities that could differentiate Omnicom's offerings for clients. Craig Cuyar, Senior VP and Global CIO, recognized that cloud migration was table stakes — the real differentiation would come from what the company built on top of it.

Omnicom migrated 75 petabytes of data from its 9 data centers to AWS, using Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering for cost-optimized storage and Amazon Redshift for unified data warehousing. The migration consolidated 9,000+ data sources and enabled real-time processing of 400 billion daily events at scale. On top of this foundation, Omnicom built an AI-powered platform using Amazon SageMaker for ML model training and deployment, Amazon Bedrock for generative AI capabilities including creative content generation, Amazon Nova for multimodal inference, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for agentic workflow orchestration.

The infrastructure results are concrete: 90% reduction in compute infrastructure costs, eliminating the financial burden of maintaining 9 data centers. The AI layer enables higher accuracy and lower costs for creative content generation — directly impacting the quality and economics of campaign production. Real-time processing of 400 billion daily events provides Omnicom with data-driven insight at a scale that was impossible across fragmented on-premises systems.

For Cuyar, the migration unlocked a shift from infrastructure management to innovation — the company now competes on what it builds with AWS, not on its ability to maintain hardware.