Over iced coffee at the Martinez Hotel, EY’s chief marketing officer John Rudaizky offered a quiet but pointed critique: artificial intelligence, he said, often delivers the illusion of accuracy and comprehensiveness. It was a remark that captured a broader mood shift at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. After a 2025 edition dominated by bold, often vague prognostications about AI’s transformative power, the conversation in 2026 had turned decidedly more sober. “People are a little more grounded,” observed George Popstefanov, CEO of PMG. “I’m hearing a lot more about, ‘it cannot do this,’ which is great.”

That recalibration did not dim the festival’s celebration of human ingenuity. Brazil, long regarded as a creative powerhouse, saw its total Lion count fall by 35 per cent to 62 trophies, a drop that Cannes Lions CEO Simon Cook attributed to a global retraction in entries rather than any waning of talent. The country’s enduring strength was underscored on the final night when the campaign “Corpo Preto” (Black Body), created by Artplan for the Instituto Yduqs, won the Grand Prix in the Glass: The Lion for Change category. The work, which combats racial bias and ableism in medical training, had already been recognised in 2025, and its return to the stage signalled that juries were rewarding sustained, real-world impact over novelty.

Beyond the Palais, the festival’s geography told its own story. Entire conference tracks and spaces were given over to the creator economy, a shift that former advertising executive Cindy Gallop described as “a completely new energy coming in.” The transactional nature of influencer marketing was on full display, but so was a maturing understanding of collaboration. At a breakfast hosted by Business Insider, YouTuber Adam Waheed, known as Adam W, explained that strong performance now hinges on a two-way street: “It’s a collaboration, and obviously, there’s always going to be pushback. It’s meeting in the middle.” Becky Owen, CMO of social agency Billion Dollar Boy, noted that the creator economy had evolved into “a sophisticated media solution capable of building genuine cultural IP.” Meanwhile, Mercado Ads, the digital advertising arm of Latin America’s Mercado Livre, unveiled a partnership with TikTok that promises to close the loop between content discovery and purchase, using first-party data to trace a consumer’s journey from a video to a shopping cart.

The most pointed arguments, however, came from those who insisted that technology alone is not the prize. Speaking at the IAA Slam, Steve Babaeko, CEO of Nigerian agency X3M Ideas, drew a motorsport analogy: everyone can drive a car, but very few can drive like Lewis Hamilton. “Access to a car has never been the same thing as mastery of a car,” he said, urging agencies to invest in taste, cultural intelligence, and the judgment to know “where to point it.” His words resonated far beyond the African delegation. From the United States, billionaire investor Mark Cuban issued a parallel challenge to AI companies, telling them to stop paying celebrities for endorsements and instead fund programmes that communities, workers, and artists themselves design. “Every creative I know is TERRIFIED about what AI will do to their profession,” he wrote. “You must meet them face to face and basically do what they say.”

As the festival wound down, the image that lingered was not of a machine but of a stage: Fernando Machado, Chipotle’s chief brand officer, likening the use of AI to write a creative brief to “thinking I could play guitar well because I’m good at ‘Guitar Hero.’” The laughter in the room was knowing, a collective exhale from an industry that had spent a year chasing a mirage and was now, perhaps, ready to trust its own hands again.