AI gets serious: A CMO’s take on the new reality at Cannes Lions 2025

Stepping off the plane at Nice Côte d’Azur Airport, the first thing I saw was our own ad staring back at me from the baggage claim carousel. “Enterprise AI built the WRITER way,” featuring one of our customers, right there welcoming arrivals to the French Riviera. We had blanketed the sun-soaked city — from airport arrivals to pedibikes cycling the Croisette to signage outside our Mediterranean-facing suite.

But we weren’t alone. Cannes Lions transforms the entire Riviera into a marketing showcase — massive brand activations spilling onto the beaches, yacht parties hosting Fortune 500 CMOs and c-suite executives, and the famous Palais des Festivals buzzing with creative directors, agency heads, and tech executives from around the world. The energy is electric, with conversations happening everywhere from beachside pavilions to rooftop terraces overlooking the Mediterranean.

My first Cannes Lions, and what struck me wasn’t the spectacle — it was the quality of conversations happening in boardrooms and beachside cafés alike. All of the decision makers were here. Over four days of back-to-back meetings, these weren’t the usual polite networking chats over aperol spritzes. Leaders at the world’s biggest brands were genuinely hungry for practical solutions, leaning in with real questions about implementation challenges and ROI timelines. The shift in tone was unmistakable — and exactly what I see when companies move from AI curiosity to serious evaluation. The casual “what can this do?” questions had given way to urgent “how do we scale our (and others’) successful use cases and agents?” conversations.

What really captured my attention was how people talked about AI — not as some distant future possibility, but as current reality they were already navigating, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The conversations had moved beyond exploration to implementation, and the excitement about proven results was palpable.

Three shifts that define the new AI reality

1. From potential to performance

The conversations felt fundamentally different from what I understand happened at Cannes last year. Marketing leaders weren’t asking about AI’s potential anymore — they were laser-focused on scaling what was already working. Several had production use cases running and were eager to expand from there. The conversation had matured from “How do we get started?” to “How do we scale these successful agents across the organization?”

The biggest challenge I heard repeatedly? Distinguishing real capabilities from polished marketing promises. When every AI company claims they can do everything, how do you know who actually delivers? This vendor fatigue was everywhere — from CMOs at global banks to marketing VPs at tech unicorns.

It’s exactly why we lead with customer stories — real companies like Uber, Qualcomm, and Salesforce sharing unvarnished results. In a market saturated with demos and promises, authenticity cuts through the noise every time.

2. From fear to empowerment

Here’s the irony that wasn’t lost on anyone: there I was at the creative industry’s biggest, most glamorous stage, marketing AI tools to creative people worried about automation.

The real challenge isn’t features or pricing — it’s change management. How do you have honest conversations with teams who are simultaneously excited about AI’s potential and genuinely worried about their future? I watched CMOs and brand leaders navigate this delicate balance in real-time, some more successfully than others.

What I’ve learned from our customers, and heard echoed in Cannes conversations: none are cutting jobs because of AI. Instead, they have mountains of AI-related roles they can’t find people to fill. The most successful implementations handle the repetitive, soul-crushing tasks so creative people can focus on what they do best — being creative. When AI becomes invisible infrastructure — quietly handling optimization and endless variations while humans focus on big ideas and strategy — that’s when the magic happens.

3. From silos to systems

Enterprises, along with their agency and consulting partners, are choosing comprehensive platforms over fragmented point solutions or expensive custom builds. When Fortune 500 companies are already spending $100 million annually on various initiatives, they need AI investments that deliver the highest ROI — not another expensive experiment that may or may not work. That’s why enterprises seek AI partners who work alongside both IT and business teams, while agencies and consultants look for platforms that enable them to deliver strategic value rather than just managing multiple vendor relationships.

What actually works: Four principles from Cannes

Perhaps the most striking validation came at the Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs luncheon, held in an elegant venue overlooking the harbor. Walking into that room and having the world’s most influential CMOs literally seek me out to discuss WRITER was surreal — these weren’t casual conversations over canapés, but strategic discussions with people leading marketing at companies that shape global culture.

From those conversations and dozens of others throughout the week, four clear principles emerged:

Focus first, scale smart: Companies getting real value aren’t trying to transform everything at once. They pick specific, high-impact use cases, prove clear value, then expand from there. This perfectly aligns with what we see at WRITER — enterprises starting with targeted content creation, proving concrete ROI within weeks, then scaling to complex workflows across sales, customer support, legal, finance, and product teams.

Think beyond marketing: The marketing leaders becoming organizational heroes introduce AI that helps legal review content faster, enables finance to track attribution more accurately, and allows product teams to test messaging at unprecedented scale. I’ve seen this transformation across industries — healthcare companies helping members truly understand their benefits, pharmaceutical teams preparing for complex sales conversations with detailed research, retailers optimizing product listings in real-time based on customer sentiment analysis. The key is thinking about AI as enterprise infrastructure, not just a marketing tool.

Cross-functional transformation: One VP at a major consumer goods company perfectly exemplified this career evolution. Twenty years climbing the marketing ranks, she’s now been tasked with developing the AI strategy by her CEO and Board — essentially figuring out how the entire company transforms into an AI-first organization. She’s not just thinking about marketing use cases; she’s examining every process that runs the business for AI integration opportunities. Her focus is the interplay between humans and AI. Who does what and how do we work side by side with agents? It’s a complete reimagining of her role from marketing execution to enterprise transformation.

Speed as strategy: The metric that actually matters isn’t cost savings or content volume — it’s speed to market and the ability to iterate and optimize in real-time. When customer preferences can shift overnight and competitive advantage is measured in days rather than quarters, this agility becomes the ultimate strategic differentiator.

Beyond the Croisette: Where the industry goes from here

My prediction after all those conversations: the marketing leaders I met will be doing three fundamentally different things.

They’ll measure AI success by concrete business outcomes — revenue impact, time savings, and market response — rather than productivity metrics alone. They’ll have established clear workflows for human-AI collaboration, not ad hoc experiments that depend on individual enthusiasm. And they’ll be having entirely different conversations with their AI partners — selecting vendors who work alongside IT and business teams rather than selling one-size-fits-all solutions.

The conference energy and Mediterranean sunshine will fade, but the practical pressure won’t. Marketing leaders who were pressured to “do something with AI” will need to show real results to their boards. Those who figured out how to start small, prove tangible value, and scale systematically will be expanding their programs and budgets. Those who didn’t will be starting over, hopefully with a clearer understanding of what actually works.

The future isn’t about choosing between human creativity and AI efficiency — that’s a false choice. It’s about combining them in ways that make both more powerful than they could ever be alone. The marketers who figure that out first will define the next phase of our industry.