Written by Sampath Karunaratne, Creative Director at MullenLowe Sri Lanka
The first thing the machine asked me wasn’t who won.
It didn’t ask about celebrity speakers, yacht party invites, agency gossip, or holding-company theatre. While we humans short-circuited through a heatwave, the machine’s prompt was unseasonably chilling in its simplicity:
Is human creativity becoming obsolete?
Somewhere between the ubiquitous AI demos, the protestations on behalf of human creativity, and Demis Hassabis invoking Blade Runner as his favorite film, Cannes Lions 2026 began to feel a little like a Voight-Kampff test for the advertising industry, an examination of what it meant to be human.
Unilever CMO Leandro Barreto’s session, “Who Carries the Fire?” provided an answer: creativity should always be reality, or human-first. Find the conversations, rituals and behaviors people are already carrying, and take them further. Vaseline’s “Mntana Ka Gogo” work in South Africa was a beautiful example: a brand not inventing culture, but recognizing something deeply human already moving through it.
But can AI tell human stories?
The answer is a little messy. In “The Future of Creativity,” a conversation with Nobel Prize-winning Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis, Scott Belsky argued that while humans will always originate ideas, AI can increase the “surface area of possibility.” Contemporary artist, Daniel Arsham, speaking with Instagram’s Tessa Lyons, seemed to extend that optimism: technology can help artists prototype faster, experiment more freely, and chase ideas once too expensive to pursue.
So will AI usher in a new era of creative risk-taking?
Risk isn’t the same as speed, however. And most artists, Arsham reminded us, will not trade control for velocity. There’s a reason filmmakers from Robert Bresson to Walter Murch say a film is discovered in the edit. Sometimes the work reveals itself only through delay, error, obsession, and the inefficient act of changing your mind.
That was the tension humming beneath Cannes. AI can generate, remix, prototype, personalize, optimize and scale. But possibility isn’t judgment. Possibility isn’t taste. And it certainly isn’t knowing which ‘bad’ idea deserves to be protected long enough to become a good one.
Newly installed Chipotle Chief Brand Officer Fernando Machado’s warning landed because it wasn’t really about AI. It was about sameness. If every car is designed in the same wind tunnel, eventually every car begins to look the same (see: the same pink colored football cleats worn by seemingly every player at the ongoing World Cup). If every brand briefs the same machines, obeys the same dashboards and sands away every strange edge in the name of performance, the work becomes aerodynamic, efficient and forgettable.
In his session, “Stop Working in Advertising: To Engage You Need to Entertain,” Sir John Hegarty sounded a similar alarm: too many business leaders look at AI as a way to cut costs, not expand opportunity. But cheaper sameness is still sameness.
So maybe the real enemy of advertising isn’t AI but indifference?
Which is why the creator takeover at Cannes felt less like a side show and more like a diagnosis and perhaps a remedy. Creators can be a threat to the advertising business, yes. But maybe they’re also a rebuke and a lesson.
At their best, creators are everything advertising claims to value before advertising gets in the way: fast, specific, instinctive, entertaining, flawed, personal, sometimes unbearable, often brave. Less focus group, more gut. Less marketing theory, more authentic experience. Less “target audience,” more actual audience.
They don’t wait six weeks to know whether something connects. The audience tells them instantly, brutally, publicly.
Sri Lanka
Of course, creators have their own clichés. Algorithms are wind tunnels too. The creator economy has its own formula, hustle theatre and sponsored emptiness.
But the most authentic creators seem to understand something that brands often forget: people don’t really give two hoots about your marketing objectives. They care about how you make them feel.
Maybe that’s what Cannes 2026 finally answered.
AI can increase the surface area of possibility.
Creativity increases the surface area of care.
Disclaimer: Parts of this article may have been hallucinated by the author after prolonged exposure to the heatwave, not enough sleep, and too much of “Cannes in a can.” Any resemblance to machine hallucination is purely human.
