What Cannes confirmed: Brand is the moat, AI agents are the engine

I’ve been doing this Cannes thing for a few years now. And every year I come in with a theory about what the conversation is going to be, and every year the conversation surprises me a little.

This year I came in expecting to talk about AI agents. What I didn’t expect was how much the conversation kept coming back to something more fundamental: brand. What it means. Why it matters more, not less, in a world where content is infinitely scalable. And what happens to a company that scales fast but doesn’t know what it actually stands for.

That’s the thing I kept hearing from CMOs across four days of conversations — at a Wall Street Journal CMO Council luncheon, in a one-on-one interview for Snowflake’s CMO Blueprint series, in a customer conversation that stuck with me, and in a dozen hallway exchanges I didn’t plan. The same thread kept pulling through all of it. So I figured it was worth writing down.

Brand isn’t softening. It’s hardening.

Here’s what I keep saying, and what I kept hearing validated this week: AI is‌ forcing marketers to spend more time thinking about brand differentiation and personal relationships than ever before.

That sounds counterintuitive. Scale content fast enough, and you’d think brand becomes less important . That it becomes just one more surface area. But that’s exactly backwards. When everyone can produce content at speed, the only thing that can’t be replicated is a real point of view. The companies winning right now are the ones who figured out that AI gives them the velocity to protect and amplify their differentiation instead of replacing it..

I watched this duality play out in conversation after conversation. The best CMOs I talked to weren’t choosing between automating and investing in brand. They were doing both, and they understood the relationship between the two: automate as much as possible so you can put more energy into what makes you unique. Let agents handle the scale. Keep humans on the judgment calls.

That’s why, also counterintuitively, the hottest investment area I kept hearing about alongside AI wasn’t another technology. It was field marketing. In-person experiences. High-touch relationship building. The reason isn’t complicated: AI frees up the space for those investments by handling what used to eat all the time and budget. You automate the routine so you can reinvest in the irreplaceable.

This isn’t just what I’m observing at WRITER. It’s showing up everywhere at Cannes. At an Axios House roundtable on June 24th, brand leaders described the same tension from a different angle: brands are diverging in how they talk about AI publicly, with high-stakes consumer categories like infant formula describing it as “both a blessing and a curse” because their business runs entirely on trust. AI isn’t going away. The challenge is to build the infrastructure to protect your brand at scale.

That’s, incidentally, exactly why encoding brand into your AI platform isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game. The difference between AI that makes you faster and AI that makes you stronger is whether your organizational context (i.e. your brand standards, your voice, your approved messaging, who reviews what before it goes live)  is built into how the system works, not bolted on afterward. When I explain how WRITER approaches this, it lands every time. Not as a product pitch. As recognition of something people are already feeling. That the risk of losing themselves in the scale is real, and they need a way to prevent it.

A detour through New Jersey

Something happened at Cannes that I want to share because it perfectly represents how I’m thinking about all of this.

I did an interview with Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake. She’s been there since before the IPO, one of the most respected enterprise marketers I know. She asked me a question I wasn’t expecting: What’s the one piece of creative work you’re convinced no AI could have made, and why?

I said The Sopranos.

I’ve been deep in a rewatch. It holds up. It’s brilliant. And it gets at something I’ve been trying to articulate about human creativity that I think matters a lot for marketing leaders right now.

David Chase grew up in Essex County, New Jersey. Italian American family. The name was DeCesare before it got anglicized. He based Tony’s mother on his own mother, Tony’s therapist on his own therapist. He had a genuinely conflicted relationship with the culture he was writing about . He wasn’t reproducing it lovingly, but rendering it with the unsparing accuracy of someone who’d lived inside it and never fully made peace with it.

That friction comes through in every line. A model can’t fake it. It can read everything ever written about Italian American life and still has never spent fifty years with a difficult mother and a surname that got changed to assimilate. A model writes the aggregate. Chase wrote one specific man, precise in every detail, because he’d lived it.

And then there’s the ending. The famous cut to black, mid-scene, mid-sentence. No resolution. People are still arguing about it.

An LLM would have given you an ending. Probably a good one, maybe even a moving one. But it would have given you a satisfying one. And satisfaction is exactly what Chase refused. The comfortable landing is the thing a model reaches for. Chase rejected comfort and closure because the truth of the character mattered more. That’s human judgment and taste overriding every instinct toward the easy answer.

The algorithm would have given you a satisfying ending. And you’d have forgotten it by now.

None of this means AI doesn’t belong in creative work. It does. Chase had one brain and one shot per scene. He couldn’t test variations, hold 86 episodes of continuity in his head, or carry a single vision across a thousand surfaces. AI couldn’t have written Tony, but it could have freed Chase from everything that wasn’t writing Tony.

That’s how I see it in marketing. Keep humans on judgment, creativity, and taste. Let the machine carry the velocity. The teams that win will be the ones clearest about which decisions stay human. Deciding which ideas have to come from taste and experience, and which don’t.

The CMOs who are getting this right are leading from the front

Three conversations from this week crystallized something I’ve believed for a while but hadn’t heard articulated this clearly until now.

The first was the Snowflake interview with Denise. One of the big threads beyond the creative question was: how do you‌ lead your team through a transformation this significant? Not just deploy AI but model it. Show people what you expect, not just tell them.

The second was the WSJ CMO Council luncheon, where a room full of serious CMOs spent real time on a hard question: what does the CMO need to be right now to own AI inside their organization? The consensus wasn’t about tools or budgets. It was about posture. The CMO who waits for the strategy to arrive isn’t going to be the CMO who shapes it.

The third was a customer conversation I had with Sarah Brooks, CMO at BetterHelp. I’ll just say it plainly: she is the most AI-native CMO I’ve met on this journey. Not the most technical, but  the most intentional. She knows what she expects from her team’s daily relationship with AI. She shows it instead of just requiring it. And it’s working. Her team is responding.

What Sarah is doing isn’t complicated, but it’s rare. She’s setting the pace, making it concrete, and making it real for the people who work for her. That’s leadership. The technology doesn’t do that part.

The reality is that asking people to change the way they’ve worked for twenty years is hard. People don’t change because they’re told to. They change because someone they respect made it real for them. They showed them what it looks like, why it matters, and that it’s actually worth the discomfort. That’s the CMO’s job right now. Not to have all the answers, but to go first.

If you’re a CMO who hasn’t built your own agent yet, that’s the place to start. Not because it’ll make you a better technologist, but because you cannot ask your team to do something you haven’t done yourself and expect it to stick.

The CMOs who are getting this right aren’t waiting to see how it plays out. They’re deciding how it plays out.

What I’m bringing back

The conversation has shifted. Last year at Cannes, the question was still “are you doing AI?” This year that question felt almost quaint. The question now is whether you’re doing it in a way that makes you more distinctive — or whether you’re just getting faster at looking like everyone else.

That’s a harder question. It requires honesty about where your actual differentiation lives, discipline about what stays human, and the infrastructure to protect your brand as you scale.

The teams that win won’t be the ones with the most agents. They’ll be the ones who know exactly what the agents are protecting.

So I’ll borrow Denise’s question and put it back on you: what’s the one thing in your marketing that you’re convinced no model could do and are you building your operation to protect it?

Diego Lomanto is the CMO of WRITER, the enterprise AI platform built for the way organizations actually work.