At Cannes Lions this year, marketers expect AI conversations to go from theoretical to practical

Sponsored by

The creator citation cure: AI search has a wonderful habit of skipping owned channels when answering questions. Later can pair your brand with creators to help with answer engine optimization. Talk to a creator AEO strategist to see how.

Amid the yachts galore and the brands and agencies jockeying for the South of France’s best activation spaces, AI has become an increasingly common topic at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

But this year, at least one thing could be different: the conversations around the future of AI could have fewer buzzwords and pie-in-the-sky claims, and more practical takeaways, execs told us.

“We’re a year smarter than we were last year, one would hope,” Ivan Kayser, CEO at the Stagwell-owned consultancy Redscout, told us. “We have a year of experience implementing AI in our workflows. So I think you can now go on stage and talk about how AI is going to change the way agencies operate, feeling pretty good about the fact that it’s not going to make you sound stupid in three months, which was definitely not the case a year ago.”

ChatGPT only hit the market in 2022, but since then, adland has raced to make sense of AI technology and find out how it can fit into marketing operations. As AI has matured and agents have become more widely used, AI has been the talk of the Croisette for at least three years. But this year, executives say they expect discussions that detail clearer, more actionable approaches to using AI in marketing—ones that can deliver outcomes and unite various parts of the AI ecosystem while still centering creativity, according to agency executives.

“In a way, it’s going to be less hyperbolic, but maybe much more transformative,” Kayer said. “It feels like we’re going to get a lot more actionable information about where the category is going—if indeed there’s a correction for hyperbole and an emphasis on tangible change.”

Practical magic

Kayser said he expects conversations at Cannes Lions this year to stress practical applications of AI.After a few years at Cannes Lions, where executives spoke in a “hyperbolic” manner about AI, Kayser said he expects a “more pragmatic” conversation” around it this time around.

Part of that, he suggested, could be due in part to Mark Zuckerberg’s comments in May 2025, where he suggested that Meta’s AI tools could both fully create and target ads by the end of 2026, which set off alarm bells industrywide.

“Zuckerberg saying that ad agencies will be disintermediated…created a defense mechanism, like, ‘Oh my God, this is an existential threat specific to us,’” Kayser said.

This year, there’s some more level-setting, he suggested: Executives have a more nuanced understanding that while AI won’t “kill advertising,” it will profoundly alter marketing operations, he said. (That could mean there’ll still be plenty of theorizing about the future of the industry.)

Gemma Spence, CEO, marketplaces at VML, said she expects that on the practical front, there will be plenty of discussion around how best to connect various AI tools. It wouldn’t be the first time the topic dominated conversations at an industry event: AI agents were a major topic at this month’s Shoptalk Europe conference, she told us

With so many agentic offerings on the market, agencies are reconciling how to unify agents’ work across platforms so they’re not doing their own “individual disparate jobs,” she said.

With models like Gemini and ChatGPT becoming more sophisticated, it’s likely agencies will want to discuss deriving actionable outcomes from them rather than relying on theoretical talking points, Spence said. She also expects discussions around vertical integration, likeChatGPT’s partnership with Shopify, to be a major point of conversation.

Art at the center

Another important theme this year at Cannes Lions will be centering creativity amid the AI transformation, Kayser and Spence both said. Even as some agencies have rearranged around AI, others are making non-AI bets in spaces like sports marketing or creativity, Kayser noted.

Spence said one major topic she expects will be how brands maintain brand positioning and tone of voice amid the rise of agentic shopping agents. She also expects conversations around GEO and connecting with consumers amid agent intermediation will be top of mind, too.

“We’re at Cannes, which is the home of creativity,” she said. “There’s going to be a lot of conversation about how brands retain salience and that emotional resonance and that human component relating to emotion and empathy when actually AI is commoditizing a lot of functional components around how people are discovering and finding products and services.”

Even if the conversations get more practical, don’t expect any earth-shattering declarations—especially since the AI landscape is still moving as fast as it is.

“It’s a funny choice you have as an agency executive to decide what [you are] going to say at the most important stage of the year,” Kayser said. “It’s actually very hard to declare anything structural, particularly in the moment of accelerated change.”