In the age of AI will we lose ‘the human touch’?

DURING THE Festival’s Opening Seminar, Apple | Human After All, Apple vice-president of creative marketing, Tor Myhren, will address the question: “Can the human touch save creativity in the age of algorithms?”

Part of the Creative Impact content stream, co-curated with WARC, Myhren’s talk goes behind the work that drove Apple to becoming the 2025 recipient of the Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year Award, and shows how sometimes “it’s as important to feel it as it is to get it”.

Tor Myhren

The issue of human/data/AI interaction is also at the heart of the session from R/GA and Sephora — Unshittifying CX: Reconnecting Funnels and Feelings.

At a time when customer experience satis- faction is declining rapidly, R/GA senior vice-president, executive strategy director Yael Cesarkas; and Sephora vice-president, mar- keting, social and influencer, Brent Mitchell, will discuss the current “loyalty crisis”.

With CX detaching itself from human emotions, they will call out the “technically sound but emotionally hollow systems that drive the ‘enshittification’ of digital experiences”.

Cannes Lions will also see a lot of debate over the role of data and GenAI. Long-standing Cannes Lions supporter Publicis Groupe, for example, has announced that its Cannes Closed Door Sessions are back, with a new mission: unlocking real — and immediate — AI upside for clients, in an economic downturn.

With the industry facing a challenging economic climate, Publicis said that celebrating creativity for its own sake won’t be enough. Leveraging Cannes Lions as a platform for progress, it wants to “put creativity at the heart of AI solutions capable of increasing market share and reducing costs immediately”.

Intriguingly, however, a key theme right now is the risk of allowing AI to render human input redundant. This will be discussed in The Human Touch: Creativity Can’t Be Automated. In this session, Stagwell chairman and CEO Mark Penn, United Airlines chief advertising office Maggie Schmerin and 72andSunny global CEO Evin Shutt will assert the importance of “bold storytelling that only humans can deliver”.

The key message from the session will be that the secret to breakthrough branding lies in “blending cutting-edge tech with the irreplaceable power of human creativity”.