Cannes Lions 2026 wasn't a creativity festival. It was an enclosure — and almost nobody on stage named it.
I spent the week reading Cannes not as a creative showcase but as a map of who is about to own what. Session after session, the same quiet move kept surfacing — one I recognise, because I watched it happen once before, from inside a bank.
Here is the pattern. When a technology makes something infinite, the incumbents don't fight it. They financialise the scarcity it creates.
AI makes content infinite, and therefore close to worthless. So the industry is busy re-pricing whatever remains scarce — trust, provenance, authorship, human judgement. R/GA called creativity "infinite idea engines" and marketing "a product, not an expense": the precise language of turning a cost centre into an asset class. OpenAI described advertising's future as an "intelligence operating model," AI as the layer the whole system runs on. Read plainly, that is one company positioning to rent intelligence back to every brand on earth — the way Google rented search.
None of this was the story the stage told. The stage told a reassuring one: AI augments, it doesn't replace; keep a human in the loop; protect trust. Everyone said it. And the unanimity is the tell. When an entire industry recites the same creed in the same week, that isn't conviction — it's a threatened profession performing its own necessity. You don't insist "robots can't build brands" unless you're afraid they can.
But here is the part that matters for anyone building with AI, and the reason I do the work I do.
We are told governance is the antidote to all this — the thing that will keep AI honest. I think that's backwards. Governance is not the antidote to the enclosure. Governance is the newest enclosure.
Because whoever owns the standard of proof — the audit format, the disclosure schema, the evidence pack, the certification — owns the toll-booth. The EU AI Act's Article 50, ISO 42001, the "responsibility principles" the platforms are busy writing about themselves: these are not only protections. They are the property regime of the AI economy, being drafted right now, largely by the people with the most to gain. The real question underneath every session at Cannes was never "is AI good for creativity." It was: who will own the means of verification?
I've seen this film before. After 2008, the banks that manufactured the crisis sold the world its compliance, and an entire industry was born on the far side of the wreckage. I spent fifteen years inside it. The lesson I took is simple and slightly uncomfortable: the money and the power never go to whoever follows the standard. They go to whoever writes it.
The money and the power never go to whoever follows the standard. They go to whoever writes it.
So my interest — and my caution — is this. If "responsible AI" ends up written entirely by the firms selling the AI, then trust becomes just another thing brands rent from the people who took it away. The alternative is independent proof: verification that belongs to the brand, not the platform. Evidence a board, a regulator and a buyer will accept precisely because it wasn't marked by the seller's own homework.
That's the work. Not AI ethics as a poster on the wall — the unglamorous, defensible proof that lets a company say "trust us" and actually back it. Especially in the volatile, regulated, cross-border places where it's hardest, like the UK/EU–Africa corridor I work in.
Cannes spent a week celebrating creativity. What it was actually doing was drawing the fences of the trust economy. The only question worth asking on the plane home is which side of the fence you intend to be on.
— Joyce Uba, JUBA & Associates