Cannes Lions 2026 just wrapped, and our team was on the ground. Over 35,000 attendees, thousands of sessions, and one unmistakable shift: the AI conversation has matured. Last year, Cannes sold AI as the creative. This year, it admitted AI is the tool.
The festival confirmed what we’ve been building toward: the brands that win will be the ones that combine the power of AI with the judgment, creativity and strategic thinking that only humans can provide. That’s hybrid intelligence. And that’s where the industry is heading.
AI Was Everywhere. But the Conversation Has Changed.
AI dominated every stage at Cannes but for the first time, the tone was more honest than hyped. The smartest people in the room finally said out loud what the industry had been whispering: nobody knows exactly where this lands yet.
AWS’s Ruba Borno offered one of the week’s most resonant metaphors. She compared AI to the titanium tennis rackets that replaced wooden ones — when players upgraded, their performance soared. But nobody said the racket replaced the player. It superpowered them. And now, if you’re not using those new tools, you can’t compete anymore. It sets a new standard.
That framing — AI as performance multiplier, not replacement — ran through nearly every conversation. Brands treating AI as a creativity amplifier are pulling ahead of those treating it as a cost-cutting exercise. That gap, many believe, will define the next decade of marketing.
One attendee captured the mood perfectly: “The real takeaway from Cannes is not the technology — it’s that we are finally having the honest conversation instead of the hype one.”
🏆 And Then Claude Won the Film Grand Prix.
The biggest moment of the awards happened on the final day. Anthropic’s “A Time and a Place” campaign — the darkly comedic Super Bowl films for Claude, created by Mother London, won the Film Lions Grand Prix, the most prestigious creative award at the festival. Out of 1,469 entries.
The campaign asked a simple question: does advertising belong everywhere? The irony was deliberate: an AI company spent $8 million on the world’s most expensive advertising platform to argue that some places shouldn’t have advertising at all. And then it won the advertising industry’s highest creative honor for doing so.
What makes this even more interesting is the process behind it. Claude itself helped produce the campaign synthesizing research, sharpening briefs, and streamlining production schedules. But the concept, scripts, direction, and performances were entirely human-led. The jury praised exactly this balance.
Film Lions jury president Pelle Sjoenell called it:
“An ad about where ads shouldn’t exist, an AI making fun of AI, a challenger that took on the market leader. The risk was profound, the execution was immaculate, and it reshuffled perceptions in the most consequential technology race of our age.”
For anyone tracking the OpenAI advertising story which we have been covering in this series , this is the creative counterpoint. OpenAI is building a full ad platform inside ChatGPT with CPC, CPA and a $2.5 billion revenue target. Anthropic is betting its entire brand on being the alternative. That strategic divide will define how AI companies monetize and how users choose between them.
