Cannes Lions 2026 marked a shift. Last year was defined by AI optimism—big ambitions, bold experiments, and endless possibilities. This year, the conversation moved from what’s possible to what delivers value. Yet for all the AI talk on La Croisette, there was a kind of fatigue with the topic itself, a sense that the industry has over-rotated to the technology while underweighting what’s actually moving the P&L.
Some of the most consequential shifts in how consumers discover products, who they trust, and where they spend their attention, are happening through creators, social platforms, and agentic commerce as well. The following five provocations capture the themes that emerged at Cannes this year and the implications that marketing leaders can’t afford to ignore.
1. AI drones and humans, in equal parts
AI was everywhere, from agentic workflows to creative production, but so were humans and creators. The winners weren’t replacing creativity with automation. They were using AI to remove friction while doubling down on the uniquely human capabilities that matter most: judgment, storytelling, taste, and cultural intuition. As AI commoditizes execution, originality and authenticity become competitive advantages.
One phrase echoed more than almost any other: mediocrity at scale. Not just “AI slop,” but a broader flattening of creative output as more of it gets produced by the same handful of models, trained on the same handful of patterns. That flattening is exactly why PR, earned media, and live experiences are rising in value. They cannot be commoditized the same way that generated content can. A campaign produced by a model trained on the same body of content as every other model will tend toward sameness, while a live moment or a piece of earned coverage resists that pull.
The takeaway wasn’t AI or humans. It was AI and humans.
2. AI is everywhere, but value is not
One question echoed across Cannes: Is AI all peanut butter but no jelly? All tech talk, but no P&L results?
Most marketers have moved beyond experimentation. Nearly 60 percent now use AI multiple times a week, yet only 10 percent have fundamentally redesigned their marketing workflows to capture meaningful business impact. Technology isn’t the bottleneck. It’s the operating model and how you hardwire AI into how you grow.
McKinsey’s rewiring view is that there needs to be a 1:1 allocation of resources—between tech investment and human change investment—to overcome stalled progress and human anxiety in the system.
The leaders making progress aren’t deploying more AI. They’re redesigning end-to-end workflows, building new capabilities, and asking different questions: Which jobs should change? Which decisions should move faster? Where can we eliminate work altogether? And most importantly—how can leaders are ensuring they are focusing AI on growth and efficiency, not just the latter?
3. Agentic commerce won’t wait
More than 50 percent of consumer journeys are already influenced by large language models (LLMs), AI search, or digital agents. By 2030, AI agents could mediate up to $5 trillion in global commerce. Yet most brands are still optimizing for a world where people, not AI, are the primary gateway to discovery.
As AI increasingly mediates how consumers discover, compare, and choose products, the rules of demand generation are being rewritten. Winning in an agentic world requires more than ranking in search. Brands need unmistakable positioning that AI can recognize and recommend, new capabilities to monitor how agents describe and compare them, and a broader demand strategy that extends beyond traditional digital channels. The next demand playbook won’t be written just for consumers. It will be written for the AI agents increasingly influencing and deciding what consumers see, trust, and buy.
4. Creators are the new growth engine
If AI dominated the conversations at Cannes, creators dominated the attention—with over 500 creators in attendance.
The creator economy has evolved well beyond influencer marketing. Podcasts have become the new talk shows. Nano-creators are outperforming celebrity reach in many categories. Increasingly, creators aren’t just building awareness—they’re shaping the full funnel—across discovery, consideration, driving conversion, and building loyalty.
As AI makes content abundant, authenticity becomes scarce. Consumers aren’t looking for more content—they’re looking for people they trust. That makes creators more than just a media channel. They are becoming one of the most effective demand-generation engines because they deliver what brands increasingly struggle to create on their own: credibility, cultural relevance, and human connection.
But here is the uncomfortable truth: Most companies still treat creators as vendors rather than strategic partners. This shift carries a structural implication that was hard to miss this year: the further hollowing out of the traditional ad agency’s role as an intermediary for buying attention. The brands that win won’t simply partner with creators. They’ll build marketing systems designed around creators as strategic collaborators, recognizing that in an AI-powered world, distinctive human voices become an even greater source of competitive advantage.
5. Sports and gaming: Where the attention lives
Sports was a real center of gravity this year at Cannes. As the FIFA World Cup unfolds, one idea surfaced repeatedly: Sports has become one of the few experiences that still commands live, global, emotionally engaged audiences at scale.
Sports are no longer just a sponsorship opportunity; they’re a gateway to culture.
McKinsey’s work on The ‘attention equation’: Winning the right battles for consumer attention offers a useful lens: The quality of attention—not simply the quantity—is increasingly what drives value. In fact, a 10 percent increase in consumer focus is associated with a 17 percent increase in spending. Sports consistently creates that kind of high-intent, emotionally invested attention.
Winning brands won’t simply advertise around sports. They’ll participate in the communities, creators, and cultural moments that sports uniquely create.