Cannes Lions 2026: Will the best work this year feel more human?

Every year, the industry arrives at Cannes with a version of the same question: What does great work look like now? This year, however, the question has an edge. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in the creative workflow, Cannes Lions 2026 is quietly becoming a referendum on something the industry has struggled to define cleanly: the value of the human.

The conversation is not about whether AI belongs in advertising. That debate, for most serious practitioners, is already over. The more consequential question is what happens to originality, emotional resonance, and creative courage when the tools of production are widely democratised. When anyone can generate a campaign, what actually separates the work that wins from the work that simply exists?

The strategic leap

For Dheeraj Sinha, CEO of McCann India, the answer has not changed, and that, in itself, is telling. At a moment when the industry is recalibrating around technology, Sinha points to something resolutely analogue: the quality of the strategic thinking underneath the work. "At the final stage, what separates the truly exceptional work is usually the clarity of the strategic leap," he says. "You suddenly see a problem differently. Or a category differently. Or the role of the brand differently. The best work has that rare quality of feeling both surprising and completely obvious in hindsight."

It is a framework that cuts through a lot of the noise around this year's festival. McCann India, part of the global McCann Worldgroup network, has consistently produced effectiveness-led work that punches above its weight on the international stage. Sinha's view is that the strongest campaigns are those where you can trace "a very clear line from human understanding to strategic thinking to creative expression to business impact", a chain of intentionality that no production tool, however sophisticated, can manufacture.

He draws a sharp distinction between culturally reactive work and genuinely insight-driven work, a distinction that the Cannes jury has historically rewarded, even if the industry hasn't always been good at making it. "A lot of culturally reactive work is really just borrowing the aesthetics or language of culture," Sinha argues. "It may feel current, but it doesn't always reveal anything meaningful about people. It has topical relevance, but not necessarily emotional depth." Reactive work, he notes, disappears as quickly as the moment that inspired it. Insight-led work endures because it is "rooted in behaviour, identity, aspiration, contradiction; the things that don't vanish with the news cycle."

The point becomes even sharper in the context of AI. Sinha's contention is that as technology becomes more democratised, originality will increasingly depend on interpretation and empathy. "Data can explain behaviour," he says. "Insight explains motivation." That gap, between what people do and why they do it, is where the most effective creative strategies are still being built. And it is not a gap that AI closes. If anything, it widens.

Craft without connection is just execution

If strategic depth is one axis of this year's conversation, digital craft is another, and it is an area where the industry's relationship with technology is most visibly in flux. Gurbaksh Singh, Chief Creative Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at Dentsu Creative India, makes a point that should be uncomfortable for anyone who has spent the last year showcasing AI-generated visual spectacle: technical excellence is no longer a differentiator.

"Exceptional digital craft is when technology disappears, and experience takes over," Singh says. "Technical excellence is now the baseline, not the differentiator. What truly stands out is work where every interaction, transition, behaviour, and system design serves a larger emotional or cultural purpose." Dentsu Creative, part of the global Dentsu network, has been at the forefront of building digitally led campaigns that attempt exactly this: the integration of technical sophistication with emotional intent.

Singh is candid about the risk of optimising for function at the expense of feeling. "We're optimising experiences so heavily for usability, speed, and efficiency that sometimes we forget to make people feel something," he says. "The most memorable digital experiences are rarely just functional; they create wonder, empathy, or delight. Craft should not only reduce friction; it should create connection." It is the kind of observation that doubles as a quiet indictment of a significant proportion of digital work produced in the last two years.

His benchmark for award-winning work is equally unambiguous: "Beautiful execution can impress you in the moment, but award-winning work stays with you long after you've seen it. The difference is usually meaning and impact." The work that excites him at Cannes this year, he says, is not AI for AI's sake, but "ideas that solve real emotional, social, or cultural problems in unexpected ways."

When creativity changes the business, not just the brief

There is a category at Cannes that, perhaps more than any other, cuts to the heart of this year's central argument: Creative Business Transformation. It is the category where the jury asks not just whether an idea was beautiful, but whether it was consequential. Rakesh Menon, Chief Creative Experience Officer at ULKA, a Havas Group company, puts the core test with precision: "Has the idea changed how a business creates value, or has it only changed how the business communicates that value?"

It is a harder question than it sounds, and Menon is unsparing about what separates genuine transformation from campaign-level performance. The jury, he explains, is looking for work that created new revenue streams, new consumer behaviours, or fundamentally new ways for people to experience a brand. "And most importantly," he adds, "does the idea outlast the campaign? Does it have the potential to become permanent rather than temporary?"

The bar for proof has risen sharply. "There is definitely a much higher level of scrutiny today around proof, scale, adoption, and whether the transformation actually lived beyond the case study itself," Menon says. He describes the strongest entries as those where "you can feel the impact even before the results start appearing on screen", a quality that speaks to the idea's direct relationship with business reality, rather than the eloquence of the case film that frames it.

For Menon, the most exciting work in this space is not just clever or innovative in a contained sense. "I think that is when transformation becomes truly exciting," he says. "When creativity is not just clever or innovative, but capable of creating impact at mass." It is a reminder that scale and depth are not mutually exclusive, and that the industry's best transformational work has always been both.

The human edge in an AI-standard world

The consensus emerging from practitioners ahead of Cannes 2026 is that AI has, perhaps paradoxically, made human understanding more valuable, not less. When production capacity is broadly equalised by technology, the differentiator shifts upstream: to the insight, the empathy, the cultural fluency that no model can reliably replicate.

Shradha Agarwal, Co-founder and Global CEO of Grapes Worldwide, a full-service digital agency that works across brand strategy, content, and performance marketing, makes the point cleanly. "New technology is giving creatives more ways to bring ideas to life, but what makes a campaign truly stand out is a strong human truth at its core," she says. "The campaigns that resonate most are usually the ones that reflect real experiences, spark conversations, or make people see something differently. Technology can support that process, but it is rarely the reason people connect with a piece of work."

Agarwal frames the competitive dynamic at Cannes with the kind of clarity that agency leaders rarely articulate publicly: "As AI becomes a common tool across the industry, human understanding becomes a bigger point of difference. Anyone can access technology, but not everyone can spot the tension, emotion, or everyday truth that makes an idea resonate." It is a formulation that, implicitly, challenges a certain class of AI-forward work (technically impressive and emotionally inert) that has circulated heavily on the awards circuit.

Adrine D'mello, Associate Vice President at White Rivers Media, a leading digital-first agency known for its work across content, social, and influencer marketing, takes the argument further, examining what AI actually changes about the creative hierarchy. "As AI standardises production speed and efficiency, human-centric qualities like empathy and emotional intelligence become even more valuable," she observes. "The creative premium is shifting toward direction, taste, and the ability to refine AI-generated outputs for maximum resonance."

D'mello's read on what the Cannes jury will reward is worth dwelling on: "Jurors favour projects that demonstrate genuine craft, artistry, and intent, in which technology serves the creative concept." Technical proficiency, she notes, is now a baseline expectation. The shift is not subtle. It means that the work entered this year will be evaluated primarily on the quality of the human thinking that shapes it, and the AI underneath will be treated, more or less, as infrastructure.

A festival at an inflection point

Cannes Lions 2026, which runs from June 22 to 26 in the French Riviera, will draw the advertising industry's global creative leadership at a genuinely unusual moment. The tools have never been more powerful. The output, by some measures, has never been more uniform. And the jury, drawn from across disciplines and geographies, will be asked to find, within the volume, the work that actually moved something.

Sinha's parting challenge to the industry is perhaps the sharpest formulation of what this festival will test: "I think the industry should reward strategic courage more strongly: work that challenges category conventions, resists algorithmic sameness, and takes a clear stance instead of trying to appeal to everyone." Algorithmic sameness. It is a phrase that describes not just a quality of AI-generated content, but a broader tendency in the industry to retreat toward the predictable when the tools make production frictionless.

The best work at Cannes this year will not announce its humanity. It will simply feel like it. A problem solved rather than a brief answered. A business changed rather than a campaign run. An idea rooted in something true enough to outlast the moment it was made for. The technology will be present, as it should be. But the shortlist, if history is any guide, will belong to the work where you can feel the thinking, and behind the thinking, a person who understood something real.