Straight from Cannes: Why the best marketers are using AI to amplify human thinking

For the past two years, the conversation around AI in marketing has centered on one question: Will it replace marketers?

At Cannes Lions 2026, the industry's biggest brands offered a very clear answer across sessions with leaders from Chipotle, McDonald's, Kraft Heinz, L'Oréal, Unilever, IKEA, Marriott, Adobe, Google and Kimberly-Clark: AI isn't replacing human thinking — it's making it more valuable.

The things that create breakthrough brands (Think: creativity, empathy, cultural understanding and consumer intuition) remain uniquely human. And as AI becomes more capable, it’s simply raising the bar for what great marketers do.

Here are six lessons from Cannes on why the future belongs to marketers who use AI to amplify human thinking.

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it can generate great marketing on its own.

The leaders at Cannes largely disagreed.

Gabrielle Wesley, CMO of Mars Snacking North America, encouraged marketers to embrace AI as a tool to amplify, accelerate and scale creativity. Fernando Machado, Chief Brand Officer at Chipotle, echoed the sentiment, comparing AI to a pizza oven: 

“AI is just another tool. Like a pizza oven — it doesn't make you a great chef. The problem is that everyone is using it to make the same thing.”

That distinction matters.

AI can generate hundreds of ideas, write copy and speed up production, but someone still needs to recognize the brilliant idea, know which concept fits the brand and have the confidence to reject work that feels generic.

In Machado's view, marketers should absolutely experiment with AI — but never at the expense of mastering the fundamentals: writing strong briefs, building distinctive brands and developing creative judgment. 

In fact, if AI frees marketers from repetitive work, it should create more time to focus on the parts of marketing that matter most.

If there was one phrase repeated throughout Cannes, it was that technology should never replace consumer truth.

Paloma Azulay, VP of Global Brand Marketing at McDonald's, warned against relying on AI to fix weak thinking. Instead, she encouraged marketers to spend time with consumers, observe real behavior and build briefs rooted in genuine human insight. 

“I do see the trap of using AI to correct a brief. It will help you get the input, but the fundamentals of great creativity and human truth will not change." 

- Paloma Azulay, VP Global Brand Marketing, McDonald's

AI can help optimize those briefs — but it cannot create the lived experiences they're built on.

Luiz Sanches of Kimberly-Clark made a similar point from a creative perspective. As AI makes polished content faster and cheaper to produce, perfection becomes the default. The brands that stand out will be those willing to embrace humanity, emotion and even imperfection.

In other words, while AI can make content, it’s humans that create meaning.

One of the most interesting AI conversations at Cannes wasn't about content generation at all.

It was about discovery.

Multiple speakers argued that marketers now need to think about how their brands appear inside AI-generated recommendations.

Todd Kaplan of Kraft Heinz challenged marketers to ask a new question: 

How does your brand show up organically in AI-generated responses? 

Meanwhile, an Adweek panel featuring leaders from Adobe, IKEA, Marriott and Unilever argued that AI is becoming a completely new discovery channel. Consumers are moving from traditional search to conversation, meaning brands need to think about how they're represented when AI helps people make decisions.

Instead of focusing solely on keywords and paid media, marketers need to build brands that AI can confidently recommend. That means creating credible content, earning positive reviews, fostering community and maintaining consistency across every touchpoint.

"What is AI rewarding? Consistency. If you say something different on Walmart, on Reddit, on your website — the AI doesn't know if it believes you. So it all comes back to being really clear on what you mean and what people really care about."

- Selina Sykes, Vice President Marketing Transformation and Social-First, Beauty & Wellbeing, Unilever

As Selina Sykes, Vice President Marketing Transformation and Social-First, Beauty & Wellbeing at Unilever put it: AI rewards consistency. If your brand says different things across different channels, the algorithm begins to lose confidence.

One of the strongest themes across multiple sessions was that AI is making creative judgment more valuable, not less.

Machado warned that when everyone uses the same AI tools with the same prompts, the outputs inevitably begin to look alike. That’s why human judgement is so critical: 

“AI at its best is a tool for humans to use to make things. The human using AI as a tool — that's what great looks like. You are still the one who has to look at the output and know whether it's good.”

Selina Sykes of Unilever reinforced this idea, arguing that while AI can imitate craft, marketers still need to develop taste and judgment. Teams shouldn't rely on AI to write the perfect brief or strategy — they should build those capabilities themselves, then use AI to supercharge them.

As AI lowers the barrier to producing content, differentiation increasingly comes from knowing what deserves to be published in the first place.

Several speakers also highlighted AI's ability to strengthen marketing decisions.

“Human intuition will never be able to tell you when a piece of creative is going to resonate with the right people in the right place, at the right time.”

- Kevin Taylor, UX and Marketing Research Leader, Google

Google's Kevin Taylor argued that intuition alone can't reliably predict which creative will resonate with the right audience at the right time. AI and data help marketers validate ideas, identify opportunities and invest more confidently. Meanwhile, Mars is already using AI to uncover consumer signals before the creative brief is even written.

The same thinking extends beyond advertising.

L'Oréal's Asmita Dubey encouraged marketers to be more ambitious about AI's role — not just asking how it can generate content, but how it can improve the consumer journey, the marketer's workflow and collaboration across the entire marketing ecosystem.

"I would be more demanding of AI. What can AI do to make the consumer journey better? What can AI do to make the marketer's journey better? Think about what AI can do in terms of making the whole marketing ecosystem work better." 

- Asmita Dubey, Chief Digital & Marketing Officer, L'Oréal

The companies seeing the greatest value from AI aren't just using it as a shortcut, they're using it to make smarter decisions across the business.

Finally, the biggest lesson from Cannes was that AI isn't changing what great marketing looks like, it’s simply changing how marketers get there.

The fundamentals remain remarkably consistent: Build a brand people care about. Understand consumers deeply. Create work that evokes emotion. Be distinctive. Be consistent. Measure what matters.

What's changing is that AI is helping marketers execute those fundamentals faster, while uncovering richer insights and removing operational friction that has long slowed teams down.

As AI-generated content becomes more common, qualities like empathy, curiosity, courage and creative judgment become even harder to imitate and therefore even more valuable.

It’s the marketers who embrace AI and use it as a tool to amplify their own thinking and creativity that will thrive in this new era.