CANNES — Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas North America, stated that artificial intelligence will not resolve current issues in the advertising industry during a discussion at the Cannes Lions advertising festival on July 2, 2026. Lanzi appeared before a live audience at the Uber Villa alongside Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of the Decoder podcast.

Lanzi noted that the advertising business is currently experiencing a dynamic she described as "crazy." She said, "We are seeing all kinds of partners offer wild things in the pitch process." She characterized these offers as "insane commercial deals that are just generally bad for people and the business." Lanzi added, "They're coming in all different types — whether it's about free AI, free platform, free whatever — that are creating a dynamic that is not good for all of us in this industry." She explained, "Because we all need to work together." Lanzi warned, "It is a people business and all of those things really, long-term, create a people problem."

She compared the current state of AI to promises made during the rise of programmatic advertising. "Whenever this conversation comes about, the promise of AI, I always go back to the promise of programmatic," Lanzi said. She continued, "I go back to that because I feel like the AI story is the new programmatic story, with the promise of everything just being absolutely automated, and that absolutely did not happen." Lanzi noted, "When programmatic was rising, there were all those promises at that time as well and now we are living that." She said that while programmatic also had many promises when it was rising, the current situation with AI differs because offers are coming from either agency partners or tech and platform partners. "But what is different here is it's coming from either agency partners or tech and platform partners," Lanzi said. "It creates a different chaos to where you started."

Digitas, which is part of Publicis Groupe, has developed its own product called Digitas AI. Lanzi said the product was designed to stimulate conversations about AI's role. "It was really designed to stimulate conversations like this," she said. She explained its purpose is to enable Digitas employees to identify tasks that could be automated by an AI agent, thereby freeing up time for other work. "It was really to say, 'Okay, everyone look at what's on your desk, what's in your day, and think about what you absolutely could build an agent to do and that way we free up our time to do this,'" Lanzi said. She added, "For me — and I'll talk about Digitas AI in particular — we started to make our people better unicorns, as we talked about the last time we met." Lanzi concluded, "That's where we started."