Cannes Lions has always been a window into where marketing is headed. Coming out of this year’s festival, one thing was clear: The leaders building winning consumer and B2B brands aren’t experimenting with AI anymore. They’re rewiring marketing.

Across Bain’s more than 15 hosted and cohosted events—and dozens of conversations with CMOs, creative leaders, and AI innovators—five themes surfaced again and again. Our recent Leaders and Laggards research, conducted jointly with Google, reinforces those themes and quantifies just how far the leaders are pulling ahead.

Here’s what we heard in Cannes, how it all adds up, and where marketers should focus next.

1. The smarter AI gets, the more critical human judgment becomes

One of the strongest themes to emerge was a shift in mindset. Last year, AI loomed as a threat to creativity and marketing jobs. This year, it was treated as an enabler. The discussion has gone from whether to use AI to where it creates the greatest value: automating repetitive work, dramatically increasing execution speed, and freeing marketers to focus on judgment, creativity, and strategic problem solving. AI has crossed the confidence threshold; it is no longer seen as a replacement for marketers but as a force multiplier for them.

That is exactly why human judgment now matters more, not less. As AI absorbs the doing, human value rises. Award juries bore this out: Fully AI-generated work consistently fell flat when human creative direction was absent. The ideas that break through are still rooted in empathy, cultural fluency, and human judgment.

2. The new divide is organizational, not technological

The AI divide on display in Cannes was stark—and it was organizational, not technological. On one side, a small group of leaders is already rebuilding billion-dollar marketing operations around agentic systems; on the other, many companies remain stuck running disconnected pilots.

The conversation has moved beyond isolated use cases to redesigning end-to-end workflows, but the constraint that separates the two camps is no longer access to AI. It is the foundational capabilities required to deploy it at scale, including first-party data, technology infrastructure, product talent, and organizational readiness and full adoption. Increasingly, competitive advantage will be determined by execution, not ambition.

Our Leaders and Laggards study quantifies the split: Leaders are 3.7 times more likely to have fully redesigned their workflows around AI and 1.8 times more likely to operate from a centralized AI roadmap with executive sponsorship. (The same research points to another hallmark of leading organizations: stronger alignment between marketing and finance.)

3. Win with two audiences: the consumer and the machine

If execution is the divide, winning now requires two playbooks. Consumer centricity remains the fundamental growth driver, as our insurgent brands research proves: In US consumer packaged goods, brands solving genuinely unmet needs represent just 2% of market share but drive 36% of category growth. The insurgent advantage has always been knowing the consumer more intimately than the incumbent.

Yet knowing consumers is now only half the job. A second audience sits between them and your brand: the machine. The traditional funnel assumed time between awareness, consideration, and purchase. That buffer is disappearing as consumers move from zero awareness to decision inside a single AI conversation. Nearly half of consumers already use GenAI to research products, and up to 15%–25% of e-commerce could be AI-led by 2030.

The algorithm reads product data and third-party signals, not brand stories, so getting machine-readable early is a creative and commercial discipline in its own right. This holds in B2B as much as B2C markets: Buying-group preference is increasingly set before a vendor is even contacted. (See our thinking on rewiring demand generation in the age of AI agents.)

4. The creator economy is growing up

The creator economy, combined with AI-powered production, is fundamentally changing how brands scale. As the cost and effort of creating campaigns falls, even the largest global brands can produce highly localized, community-specific marketing that reflects different creators, cultures, and consumer motivations. Mass media remains essential for reach, but competitive differentiation is increasingly built through owned, earned, and creator-led channels that deepen relevance and intimacy at the local level.

An estimated 500 creators descended on the Croisette this year for a reason: Creator partnerships are becoming strategic capabilities rather than campaign tactics. Talent that once took 10% to 15% of budgets now cuts out the middlemen and commands disproportionate margins, and leaders are bringing the capability in-house through long-term partnerships, not one-off sponsorships.

5. Winning means understanding how buying groups actually decide

These shifts aren’t only a B2C story. B2B marketing had a genuine presence in Cannes this year—from the full-day Lions B2B Summit to award-worthy work, prominent panel representation, and compelling evidence that creativity drives commercial results. Leading CMOs are embracing “buyability,” a practical approach LinkedIn and Bain developed to create confidence in the buying group when selecting a vendor.

To help companies assess buyability, Bain launched its Likelihood to Buy^SM metric, which predicts how buying groups choose between competing brands. The metric correlates directly with win rates and creates a practical playbook to increase them.

From inspiration to transformation

For years, creativity lived inside the Palais in Cannes and technology lived outside it. This was the year the two started talking. The mood shifted with it. Last year’s fear that AI is coming for marketing’s soul gave way to something more optimistic: the recognition that automating the unglamorous frees marketers for the work that actually matters. The briefs. The big cultural bets. The creative instincts no model can replicate.

The brands leaving the Croisette with momentum have stopped asking whether to rewire their organizations and started asking how fast. AI-accelerated growth is already here. It just isn’t evenly distributed yet.

The window to lead is open, but it won’t be for long.