Cannes Lions 2026: Three priorities shaping the future of marketing

Every year, Cannes Lions gives us a snapshot of where marketing is heading. This year, one thing was clear: the conversation around AI has changed.

The debate is no longer about whether AI works. The focus has shifted: how do organizations make it work at scale?

Across the week, three themes stood out.

1. The AI-ready organization

For the past two years, the focus has been on technology. At Cannes this year, the conversation moved to transformation.

Tellingly, it felt like more brands than ever brought their CFOs. AI is no longer just a marketing conversation. It’s a business conversation and an investor conversation too.

The biggest barrier to AI was never access to the tools. It’s whether the organization is built to draw maximum value from them. True transformation is likely 10% tech, 20% data and infrastructure, 70% people and process. The organizations pulling ahead are treating AI not as a technology shift, but as a business and human one.

That means transformation isn’t a project, it’s a permanent line item. A portion of spend will always go toward adapting: training, restructuring, testing, evolving. That’s what makes an organization resilient.

But, resilience is only half the story. Real AI savings don’t just get banked (although they certainly can be!), they get reinvested: into media, into brand, into innovation. Done right, this isn’t just about surviving the shift. It’s about opening up a completely new canvas of competitive advantage.

2. Brands now have two audiences

Every brand now communicates with two audiences at once. People decide what they connect with, trust and buy. Machines increasingly decide what gets discovered, recommended and surfaced along the way.

That second audience isn’t hypothetical. Search and feed algorithms, recommendation engines, and LLMs that synthesize answers directly all sit in the path of discovery now, interpreting a brand before a person ever sees it. They’re not just distribution channels, they’re compressing everything a brand is into signals.

And the two audiences see very differently. Think of it as narrow beam versus wide beam vision. Models focus tightly on features, claims and explicit signals, they respond to what’s stated, not implied. Humans see wide: the whole story, the emotion, the semiotics, picking up on what’s implicit as well as explicit. Research comparing how humans and AI models scored the same set of Cannes Lions ads found almost no overlap. The answer isn’t two creative strategies, it’s stronger, more consistent brand systems that hold up under both kinds of vision. Models also learn from a wider set of inputs than most brands account for, from reviews to creator content, so that consistency has to extend beyond owned channels into the wider ecosystem. Now brands need to be legible to a machine audience too.

3. Culture moves at machine speed

The third theme was impossible to miss: creators, content and creativity are back at the centre of everything. Culture moves faster, audiences are more fragmented and brands have to earn relevance in real time rather than assume it.

From a technology perspective, AI alone doesn’t make great marketing. People do.

As machines take on productivity, every human role has to add strategic or creative value. Roles that “raise the ceiling”, not the floor.

Creativity evolves too. The tension between craft and scale is not a divide but a design principle – both matter and they serve different purposes. Craft builds meaning and emotion; scale builds relevance and participation.

Looking ahead

My lasting impression from Cannes Lions 2026 is that AI is no longer the story. What organizations do with it is.

The technology will keep getting better, that was never in question. The real test is whether people, process and culture can evolve fast enough to keep up.

The businesses that stay one step ahead will be the ones that turn technology into real transformation.