Shelly Palmer’s Cannes briefing: 4 shifts shaping this year’s festival

Shelly Palmer is the advanced media professor in residence at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consultancy that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media, and marketing. The views expressed in this perspective are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Google.

Cannes Lions opens in the coming days, and it is clear that the AI conversations are going to focus on enterprise deployment at scale. This means different things to different people, and I’m expecting the following four areas to be displayed and debated in every conceivable way.

1. Emerging agentic commerce

When someone asks Gemini (or any of the foundation models) “what’s the best [whatever] for my situation,” the answer is shaped by a system that is being optimized for agentic commerce. We are on a journey that will take us to transactions executed on behalf of a consumer reducing friction from discovery to checkout.

Most brand marketing data, product data, and customer success content are purpose-built for human consumption: emotional conversion, beautiful storytelling, searchable inventory. AI systems do best with structured specificity. They reward clarity over creativity, and they treat a beautifully written homepage as one signal among thousands. “Share of prompt” is becoming the new “share of mind.” Universal Cart and the emerging Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) are the first formal acknowledgments that the checkout itself is being optimized for machine-to-machine interaction.

2. Allocation of nonworking media dollars

Every production budget I have ever seen has two line items. The required line: cutdowns, resizes, localizations, and every version of the asset the media plan demanded. The inspired line: the campaign idea, the hero spot, the thing people remember. The required line used to cost real money, which is why a large supply chain of production companies, post houses, and freelance specialists stayed in business. With Veo, Nano Banana, Gemini Omni, and the next wave of frontier models, the cost of producing the required line will become negligible (compared with its current cost). Talent, budget, and executive attention now flow to the inspired line, which has never been more important and never been harder to produce.

I have spent countless hours in edit bays watching skilled humans do work the machines now do in seconds. The temptation is to feel romantic about that. Don’t. The economic point is that the floor of competence is rising globally, and the ceiling is unchanged. Everyone gets more output, more variants, more iterations. The market will continue to reward human taste and judgment. Cannes Lions will surface the people who have it, the same way it always has.

3. Trust as ‘the’ currency

When the audience cannot trust the pixel, they double down on the person. Call it market structure responding to a supply shock. The cost to produce convincing synthetic content has collapsed, which means the value of provenance, of human endorsement, of “an actual person stood behind this,” is one of the few signals a consumer can still use to filter the feed. The creator economy was never just about reach. It was about a parasocial bond that a generative model cannot reproduce, because the bond exists outside the content.

This has practical consequences for how you allocate spend. If you treat creator partnerships as a media buy with a CPM, you are missing the point and likely overpaying. YouTube has spent two decades building the infrastructure for that trust to scale, which is why every Cannes panel about creators will mention YouTube at least four times. Pay attention to who shows up on those panels. They are the people you should be talking to over dinner, not consuming as panel content.

4. The leadership challenge

I have been writing some version of this for more than three years, and I will write it again, because it is the single most important thing senior leaders need to internalize before getting on the plane. The technical barriers to deploying useful AI have effectively evaporated. The bottleneck is the org chart, incentive structures, organizational inertia, and the well-documented human tendency to expand work to fill the time allotted.

A team I worked with at a multinational client used generative AI to compress a recurring weekly three-hour task into 30 minutes. That is a real productivity gain. What happened with the two and a half hours that opened up? Some people moved on to the next task on their list. Others quietly rewrote and re-rewrote the work product until the deliverable filled the original time window. The technology gave them the gift. The culture refused it. As the saying goes, “The only people who like change are babies in wet diapers.” This is the leadership challenge of our time.

I expect the focus on the Palais to be on operational specificity. Which Monday-morning status meeting exists only because nobody trusts the dashboard? Which approval step was always theater? Which middle-management role exists primarily to coordinate a workflow that an AI agent can now run unsupervised? Which 2026 budget assumption was quietly built on cost structures that have already collapsed? These are unglamorous July questions. They all need answers.

The magic of Cannes Lions

I am beyond excited to attend this year. I’m looking forward to different opinions, different use cases, and, most importantly, the extraordinary opportunity to connect with the most talented and creative marketers and technologists in the world. All you need is an open mind, a willingness to learn a little, teach a little, and the desire to engage. You can leave the rest to the magic of Cannes Lions (and rosé on the Palais).