While everyone is posting about what they talked about at Cannes, I want to dig
By Jeffrey Cohen · June 30, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
While everyone is posting about what they talked about at Cannes, I want to dig into the conversation nobody was having. The harder one. The one that actually matters.
Everyone at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity was talking about new tools they built, how AI is changing the industry, how consumer and shopper behavior is shifting. That is all true. But it is only part of the story.
The missing piece is organizational change. Most businesses are not built for this moment, and until you do the hard work of transforming how you operate, you will never unlock the real power of AI.
So I pushed. I asked: how has your organization actually changed? What systems have you put in place to prepare for an agentic future? That is where the conversation stalled.
Everyone is building for AI. Almost nobody is preparing their workforce for it.
Using AI tools and being built for AI are not the same thing.
At Skai we made a decision to do the harder work. A full company reorganization. Not to add AI features on top of how we already operated, but to rethink how we operate so that AI could actually compound. Different team structures, different workflows, and a fundamentally different set of expectations from our partners. We were direct about what we needed and what we were asking for in return.
The industry has a systems problem, not a tools problem. Everyone has access to the same models. The gap is in the organizations around them.
If your company looks and runs the same as it did two years ago, you are not building for what is coming. You are just buying better software.
That was the conversation I kept wanting to have on the Croisette. A few people were ready for it including James Fellows from Amazon Ads. Most were not. If you want to hear our whole conversation, check out the link in the comments.