Powered by AI, Led by Humans: The Real Takeaway from Cannes

The Prodigy team was on the ground at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity June 16-19 for a five-day celebration of creative minds and bold b

rands, keynotes by day and socializing throughout the night.  

The aftermath of Cannes is often a marker for the next 12 months of brand trends and decision-making. The conversations at Cannes echo through the Zoom calls, Slack huddles and the boardroom presentations of top marketers, agencies and the vendors that support them for the next year and beyond.

We expected Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be a top theme of the week, but ultimately it turned out to be the theme of the week. AI is omnipresent in all aspects of the marketing ecosystem with the intent to deliver on new workflows with previously unthinkable speed and precision. Whether it’s in data capture, ad targeting or the creative process, one cannot ignore the impact that AI has had and will continue to have on the marketing industry. 

Today we are merely scratching the surface of AI’s ultimate impact. The next 12 months will unveil the true, long-term impact of AI-based technologies in our jobs and our daily lives.

Here are some of the top AI-focused conversations from the week:

·       Omnicom's "The Age of Integration" session shared insights on their proven record over decades "building and evolving brands through technology innovation at scale", of which AI is the latest frontier in their journey

·       Mastercard's panel on the quantum marketing ecosystem where there's always intertwined combinations of "creative & tech", "tech & data", "creative & data", preferring to define AI  as  "Augmented Intelligence.”

·       Microsoft's Co-Pilot tools encourage humans to "Be the Pilot" (and not the passenger of) AI. 

AI plus Humans is the foundation of our Prodigy platform. Indeed, we trademarked our process as “SaaMS” (Software as a Managed Service) as a replacement for traditional SaaS precisely to more accurately describe our machine + people value proposition.   But without our team of product specialists and technology experts integrating AI in all the right ways, and our brand marketers effectively using it, our tool would not be nearly as effective as it has proven to be.

At Cannes, our main goal was to demonstrate and gather feedback on our new AI-based ‘Plus’ Chat platform feature that represents 12 months of client needs-gathering, design and development work. This agentic AI Chatbot feature within our platform puts marketer's historical data literally at their fingertips. Rather than spending hours searching through dozens of documents to derive key insights, “Plus” analyzes the documents and delivers them in seconds. The best quotes we received from top marketers about Prodigy “Plus” were that it leads to “quicker decisioning, with less resources” and “we’re wanting to deploy it probably faster than you can keep up!”  

One of the key early learnings using ‘Plus’ is creating a clear prompt and challenging the responses.  We showed our clients the AI-driven results of generic prompts vs. increasingly probing prompts - and the differences are stark. Just as you would respectfully challenge a team member when collaborating on a solution, challenge the AI to think more deeply and uncover epiphanies that can transform your business.  

So, what do we see for the next 12 months? Humans are becoming more facile with AI and achieving better outcomes. Eliminating mundane tasks so work hours are reoriented toward tasks that deliver high impact. Next year at Cannes, let the conversation be dominated by tangible success stories of AI-powered marketing effectiveness and productivity. At Prodigy we are privileged to be on the front lines of the AI product revolution, using an innovative model of machines plus people to advance the future of work in our time.