The Human Advantage

Over the last few days, I’ve moved between Spotify Beach, ADCOLOR, Creative Misfits x Zangers, Empower Café and The Marketing Society & Sky Media’s Salon in the Sky.

On paper, these conversations had very little in common.

One explored creativity and self-awareness. Another focused on creators and business. Others tackled respect, storytelling, community and leadership.

Yet despite the different stages, speakers and audiences, they all seemed to circle back to the same question: how do organisations stay relevant in a world changing faster than ever?

Every year Cannes arrives with a headline.

A theme that dominates the stages, fills the beach activations and becomes the answer to almost every question. This year, many expected that theme to be AI.

And to be fair, AI is everywhere.

It’s in the keynotes, the product demonstrations and the conversations taking place between meetings. It is being positioned as the solution to everything from productivity and creativity to growth and transformation.

Yet a few days into Cannes Lions, the most interesting conversations I have heard have not really been about technology at all.

They have been about people.

That might sound surprising given the pace of technological change. Yet across very different stages, speakers and sectors, I keep hearing variations of the same conversation.

How do we understand people better? How do we build stronger relationships? How do we create organisations, brands and experiences that people actually want to be part of?

At The Unmistakables, we often talk about organisational lag: the gap between how organisations think the world works and how it actually does. The more conversations I sit through at Cannes, the more I find myself thinking that many of the challenges organisations are wrestling with today are really symptoms of that gap.

While many are being framed as technology challenges, they often feel more like challenges of understanding. The issue is rarely a lack of tools. It is a lack of proximity to the people organisations are trying to serve.

One of the most fascinating conversations I attended this week was on Spotify Beach between Keke Palmer and Jay Shetty. On the surface, it looked like a discussion about creativity, personal growth and success. What it became was a conversation about self-awareness.

Keke Palmer spoke about the importance of developing a relationship with yourself before looking for validation from others. She talked about originality not as a creative technique, but as a consequence of knowing your own voice well enough to trust it.

Listening to her, I found myself thinking about organisations. Much like individuals, organisations often look externally for certainty. They chase trends, mirror competitors and seek validation from the market, sometimes at the expense of understanding what makes them distinctive in the first place.

The challenge is rarely a lack of information. More often, it is a lack of confidence in their own perspective.

A similar theme emerged during ADCOLOR’s discussion on creators and business.

For years, creators have largely been treated as distribution channels. People brought in to amplify a message after the important decisions have already been made. Increasingly, that model feels outdated.

What emerged repeatedly was the idea that creators are not simply content producers. They are sources of intelligence. They understand communities, nuance and emerging behaviours long before they appear in a report, a dashboard or a trend presentation.

The implication for organisations is significant.

The question is no longer whether you involve different voices. The question is whether you are listening to the people who understand your audiences best before decisions are made rather than after. Growth increasingly depends on relevance, and relevance depends on understanding.

Another conversation that stayed with me came from Creative Misfits x Zangers.

The session explored a deceptively simple question: who does creativity belong to?

Much of our industry still tends to locate creativity inside agencies, brands and creative departments. Yet many of the examples discussed came from somewhere else entirely. Communities responding to challenges. Individuals solving problems. People finding new ways to organise, connect and support one another.

What struck me was how closely this connects to a challenge we see in organisations every day.

Many organisations assume their best ideas will come from inside the business. Yet some of the most valuable insight, creativity and innovation often exists much closer to customers, communities and lived experience. In other words, the challenge is not always generating new ideas. Sometimes it is recognising where those ideas already exist.

Perhaps that is another form of organisational lag: believing innovation sits exclusively inside the organisation when some of the most valuable intelligence may already exist outside it.

The same theme appeared again at Empower Café during a discussion on respect as a business advantage.

Not respect as a value statement hanging on a wall, but respect as a commercial strategy. The panellists explored how trust, transparency, inclusion and meaningful relationships influence performance, innovation and long-term growth.

None of this felt particularly revolutionary.

Yet perhaps that is precisely the point.

Many of the most powerful ideas at Cannes this year are not new ideas at all. They are reminders that people want to be seen, communities want to be understood, employees want to contribute and customers want to feel recognised. In a year dominated by conversations about technological acceleration, the recurring message has been remarkably human.

On Tuesday afternoon, at The Marketing Society & Sky Media’s Salon in the Sky, I attended a conversation with actor Eddie Redmayne. Despite being framed around television, storytelling and content, the discussion returned to a familiar theme.

Stories remain one of the most powerful ways human beings make sense of the world. Technology changes. Platforms change. Formats change. But our need for meaning, connection and understanding remains remarkably constant.

Which brings me back to AI.

The more people I hear speak about AI, the more convinced I become that the organisations that benefit most from it will not necessarily be the organisations with the best technology.

They will be the organisations with the deepest understanding of people.

Technology can accelerate, optimise and scale. It can help organisations work faster and more efficiently. What it cannot do is replace curiosity, empathy or cultural intelligence. Nor can it close organisational lag on its own.

That still requires people.

If there is one thing Cannes has reinforced so far, it is that the organisations, brands and leaders best positioned for growth are the ones paying closest attention to people. Whether the conversation is about creators, culture, AI, storytelling, leadership or community, the underlying theme keeps returning to the same place: understanding human beings remains a competitive advantage.

This evening, Asad and I are heading to the VIP Campaign Party, continuing our annual tradition of opening up a Cannes of worms wherever the conversations take us.

There is still plenty of listening to do, plenty of assumptions to challenge and, no doubt, a few more unexpected insights waiting to emerge. We’ll share what we hear from the rest of Cannes in next week’s Memo.