At this year’s Cannes Lions festival, agency leadership kept repeating a version of the same line: clients are behind on AI, and the gap is widening, not closing.
One network CEO described their agency’s AI platform posting triple-digit revenue growth for five straight quarters, framing it as proof the market simply isn’t catching up. Executives sorted their own clients into four camps — a quarter building with AI, a quarter wanting to but unsure how, a quarter frozen, a quarter still calling it a fad.
Here’s the contradiction. In the same set of conversations, one executive admitted the typical client brief fixates on the wrong question entirely — “how many agents does your company have” instead of “how do we measure impact” — and called that obsession with agent count a race to the bottom.
So the same room of people is arguing, at once, that clients are behind for not adopting fast enough, and that the clients adopting fastest are asking the wrong question when they do it. Both complaints can’t be the real diagnosis.
What CMOs actually describe isn’t reluctance. It’s structural friction most agency roadmaps don’t account for.
Data governance, procurement, and legal sign-off move at a pace no six-week campaign timeline anticipates — one client’s AI tool had to clear a full cybersecurity review before a single self-serve feature went live. Budgets are often flat while AI experimentation is expected to be funded from inside them, with returns that may not show up for three to six months, if they show up at all. And in a growing number of companies, the CMO has quietly become the default owner of AI strategy for the entire business, not just marketing, while the CIO’s office is still buried in infrastructure elsewhere.
Even inside the reporting, someone was candid enough to admit that being “ahead” is also, conveniently, exactly what the agencies making this argument are selling.
Adoption speed and adoption judgment are being treated as the same measurement here. They aren’t. A leadership team that slows down to ask what a tool is actually meant to change before it touches customer data isn’t behind — it’s doing the one thing that determines whether the investment still looks smart in two years, once this wave of fast, unexamined adoption gets its first real audit.
The agencies and CMOs worth watching over the next year won’t be the ones with the most tools deployed. They’ll be the ones who can say, specifically, what changed and why it mattered to the business — a far harder thing to fake than an agent count.