CANNES — Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas North America, criticized inflated promises surrounding AI-driven partnerships during a live panel at the Cannes Lions advertising festival on July 2, 2026. Lanzi made the remarks while appearing on the Decoder podcast, hosted by Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, in front of a live audience at the Uber Villa.

"I don't think that's a surprise to anyone in this room. Everywhere here at Cannes, the conversation is about AI," Lanzi said. She described the current environment as chaotic. "In the business right now, it's crazy. I've been in this business for a long time and we are seeing all kinds of partners offer wild things in the pitch process," Lanzi stated. She noted that these offers included "free AI, free platform, free whatever — that are creating a dynamic that is not good for all of us in this industry."

Lanzi compared the current AI landscape to the rise of programmatic advertising. "I always go back to the promise of programmatic. How many of you remember when programmatic was a thing?" she asked. She recalled that during that period, there were promises of magical automation. "And that was a time when it was all just going to magically happen and it magically still needs people, still has the nuance of brands and the marketplace and all of the things that we do to define our partnerships and what are going to be game changers," Lanzi said. "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." She added, "When programmatic was rising, there were all those promises at that time as well and now we are living that."

According to Lanzi, the current situation differs because the pressure is coming from industry insiders. "But what is different here is it's coming from either agency partners or tech and platform partners," she said. "It creates a different chaos to where you started." She warned about the long-term implications for the workforce. "Because we all need to work together. It is a people business and all of those things really, long-term, create a people problem," Lanzi said.

Digitas, part of Publicis Groupe, has approached AI with a focus on augmenting its workforce. "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 said. She explained the strategy involved asking employees to identify tasks suitable for automation. "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 stated. "That's where we started." Publicis acquired the company Influential in 2024 to analyze the creator ecosystem.