I Went To Cannes Lions For The First Time. Here's My Field Report.

I went to Cannes Lions for the first time this year.

As a pre-seed startup founder, that's admittedly placing a pretty big bet. Coming from 20 years of helping execs maximize every second, I couldn't help but feel some operator guilt about not being able to predict the ROI I'd find on the Croisette. 

Still, I've been peddling "the serendipity of connection" long enough that I decided to take my own advice and go in pursuit of the comms & PR community.

If you weren't at Cannes Lions this year, here's my on-the-ground report from the conversations that mattered most.

It's a hot, sweaty mess, but magic does in fact happen.

In this breed of heat, embracing your sweat is the only strategy. My favorite swag item was electrolyte lolipops (soooo smart). It's hard to find food during the day, so you're hungry. Your friendliest shoes become your enemies. Every beach activation and every yacht is blasting music. It's an overwhelmingly stimulating environment. 

But the chaos is a feature, not a bug, and a big part of the bonding experience and networking. Common enemies make friends. I made invaluable connections in the pursuit of food, AC, and transportation. Some of the best meetings were in the back of Ubers and on the dance floor. 

A note to my future self: the way to do it is to have a couple of anchoring meetings and events each day, but leave ~30% for curious wandering and spontaneous conversations.  

My Cannes Lions 2026 AI takeaways: everyone's talking about it, but nobody's figured it out.

The conversations were unsurprisingly dominated by AI. How marketing and comms professionals are using it. Questions around labor displacement and operating models. Attempts to separate fact from fiction. And lots of, "How do we do AI without messing up our culture and freaking out our team?"

My biggest takeaway? Big-budget marketing and communications teams who attend Cannes are much earlier with AI than I expected.   

Basically every communications leader I talked to, both in-house and on the agency side, is still experimenting or building prototypes and trying to thoughtfully turn the ship while balancing demands from CEOs and shareholders. AI is showing up across every team, but mostly in the name of productivity and FOMA.  

What I'm not seeing yet are AI agents in PR and communications fundamentally changing how these functions operate - which is the real opportunity and where this whole AI thing is going. And that's exactly the gap we want to close at Honeyjar and an opportunity for everyone to take in: it’s still early days, as long as you aren’t actively resisting AI, you’re still right on time. 

What I think we'll be talking about at Cannes 2027

The most interesting marketing and communications talks at Cannes next year won't be talking about AI experiments or one-off agents handling tactical things like brand monitoring or RFPs.

They'll be talking about how they've fundamentally redesigned their teams around AI, which agents own what, how humans fit into the loop, and what that new AI operating model for communications is producing for the business. No one really wanted to touch that this year and I get it — we're all waiting to see where AI goes. One foot in the old world, one foot in the new.

But next year my money is on the conversation shifting from, "We're experimenting with AI," to, "Here's how our marketing and communications function runs on AI."

On the agency side, I also think we'll start seeing real consolidation driven by AI, not just AI being cited as the reason for consolidation. As AI absorbs more execution work, the advantage shifts to firms with the best talent, the strongest processes and SOPs, and the infrastructure to build and manage agent systems. Agencies without those advantages will find it harder to compete.  

This isn’t something to fear. Just something to plan for. The agencies and in-house teams building that infrastructure now will be the ones leading these conversations on the Croisette next June.

So, was Cannes worth it?

And for anyone wondering whether Cannes was worth it, for us, it absolutely was. I left with relationships we couldn't have built anywhere else, product ideas we’ve already put into production, and a renewed appreciation for something I've been telling executives for years. Serendipity does compound.

If you're rethinking how your comms team operates around AI, that's what we're building Honeyjar to do. Get early access.